A post by David Livingstone Smith

I have been studying dehumanization for more than a decade, trying to understand what it is and how it works. In this short essay, I will share some thoughts with you about the role of imagination in the dehumanizing process.

First, I need to clarify what I mean by “dehumanization,” because the word is used to mean so many different things. I use the term “dehumanization” to mean the attitude of conceiving of others as less than human creatures. This is a psychological phenomenon—a way of thinking of others. But it is not just psychological, because dehumanization is a psychological response that is activated by political forces. Both of these aspects—the psychological and the political—need to be considered when addressing dehumanization. Neglect the psychological side, and you end up with an impoverished story, because dehumanization affects human behavior, and it is impossible to account for human behavior without turning to psychology. Neglect the political side, and you cannot understand where dehumanizing ideas come, why they arise in certain places at certain historical moments, and what it is that sustains them.

In my view, it is certain imaginative dispositions that make dehumanization possible. As I use the word, to imagine is to mentally reach beyond what we observe. When we imagine, we “look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen,” as Christian scripture puts it. This is distinct from fantasy. Fantasy aims at concocting fictional portraits of reality. It pretends that the world is or will be other than it is. But in imagining, we seek a richer, deeper, truer understanding of the world than the one that is ratified by our sense organs. 

Scientific theories are imaginative constructions, because they go beyond what our sense organs tell us and posit the existence of unobservable things to explain the world as we perceive it. For example, when Einstein developed equations explaining the motion of tiny particles dancing in a liquid or gaseous medium as caused by unobservable molecules colliding with them, he was exercising his theoretical imagination. Folk-theories are also imaginative constructions that seek to explain the observed by citing the unobservable. The idea that a natural disaster—say, a flood—is caused by the wrath of God, is every bit as theoretical as Einstein’s account of Brownian motion.

 “Imaginative dispositions” are widely shared psychological dispositions to follow certain kinds of imaginative pathways rather than others. Think of them as intuitive folk-theories—non-scientific theories that are part of our psychological make-up, either because they are in some sense innate, or because they are acquired through the process of socialization. As the philosopher Sarah-Jane Leslie has shown, such imaginative dispositions often color, and can distort, our more explicit scientific and philosophical theorizing (Leslie, 2013) due to their power and pervasiveness.

I have claimed that there are particular imaginative dispositions that underpin dehumanization. To flesh out the details of this claim, I will draw on an example—one that is in many respects typical of dehumanizing propaganda—taken from the 1937 Nazi text The Jew as Criminal.

Just like the spirochete bacteria that carries syphilis, so are the Jews carriers of criminality in its political and apolitical form…. The Jew is the true opposite to a human being, the depraved member of a subracial mixing…. He is the embodiment of evil that rises against God and nature. Wherever his miasma strikes, it causes death. He who contends with the Jews, contends with the devil (quoted in Confino, 2014, p. 7).

This passage lists a mixture of properties that Jews have supposedly been observed to possess, and unobservable properties that account for the observable ones. Regarding the former, Jews are said to be criminals, to be depraved, and to cause death (to Aryans). These “facts” about Jews are explained by the unobservable properties posited in what might be called the Nazi Theory of Jews. Jewish criminal behavior is explained by the “criminality” that they “carry” within them. Despite their having the outward form of human beings Jews are actually the “opposite” of human beings. They are suffused with an evil, Satanic force, and their deadliness is caused by the “miasma” (an invisible, toxic, polluting vapor) that they exude.

The idea that Jews are not really human was central to the Nazi Theory of Jews. They never denied that Jews appear to be human, but they regarded this as misleading. The appearance of humanity is merely a façade, concealing a demonically subhuman core. There is a body of psychological research that explains how the imaginative leap from human appearance to subhuman reality occurs. It concerns what is known as psychological essentialism. Psychological essentialism is a widespread if not universal disposition to divide the world of living things into sharply bounded natural kinds (for example, biological species), and to believe that membership in any of these kinds is fixed by the possession of a set of “deep” unobservable properties that only and all members of the kind possess. Psychologists call these putative properties the essence of the kind.  Psychological essentialism is crucial for making sense of dehumanization, because it explains how it is possible to regard someone as outwardly human and yet insist that they are not really human in virtue of possessing a non-human essence.

Imagining that some people who look human possess a nonhuman essence is necessary for dehumanization, but it is far from sufficient. Dehumanized people must have a subhuman essence, and that requires us to make sense of the notion of subhumanity. The idea of subhumanity is part of an imaginative construction, albeit one that is so thoroughly ingrained in our moral psychology that we usually do not recognize it as such. It is based on a vision of the world as a hierarchy, with each kind of entity occupying an allotted rank. The hierarchy is organized on the basis of intrinsic value.  Whose beings possessing greater intrinsic value—those whose lives matter most—are superior to those with less intrinsic value, and whose lives matter less or not at all. Non-human organisms are usually thought to be lower on the hierarchy than humans are, and therefore as subhuman. This is evident in our specimen passage, where Jewish subhumanity is suggested by the comparison of Jews with the syphilis-causing spirochete bacterium.

The historian of ideas Arthur O. Lovejoy held that this pre-scientific theory, referred to as the Great Chain of Being, was a European invention—a metaphysical model that faded away with the rise of scientific biology during the 18th and 19th centuries (Lovejoy, 1936). But this is wrong on two counts. The concept of a hierarchy of nature was never limited to European civilization. Although not universal, it is much more widely distributed than that. And although it has ostensibly been banished from scientific biology, the Great Chain is alive and well as an imaginative disposition that structures our relations with non-human organisms and with one another. This is easy to verify. We feel free to swat a fly or eat a carrot because it is “only a fly” or “only a carrot,” and therefore its life doesn’t matter. And Jews could be condemned to the furnaces of Treblinka because they were, after all, “only Jews.”

In conclusion, dehumanization lies at the intersection of two compelling imaginative dispositions: our propensity to essentialize and our propensity to project a grand hierarchy onto the natural world. When we dehumanize others, we attribute to them the essence of an organism that exists lower down the hierarchy. Of course, there is much more that needs addressing than this to give a comprehensive account of how dehumanization works. One must explain how propaganda and ideologies harness these imaginative dispositions to serve political ends, why dehumanized groups are so often conceived of not merely as subhuman animals, but also as demons and monsters, and how the ideologically-infused concept of the human works. I do my best to address these and more in my most recent book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization (Smith, 2021).

References

Confino, A. (2014). A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Leslie, S.-J. (2013) “Essence and natural kinds: when science meets preschooler intuition,” in Gendler, T. (ed.). Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Vol. 4: 108-66.

Lovejoy, A. O. (1936). The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Smith, D. L. (2021). Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.