Our foes are “snakes,” the classic gangster films refer to informants as “rats,” and evil men as “monsters.” But why do our conceptual metaphors describe these categories of people as subhuman entities with the power of language?
The University of New England professor of philosophy, David Livingstone Smith, has brought keen insight to the field of dehumanization, a rather neglected topic in scholarly networks. Smith’s research in his book “Less than Human” has received accolades from the Anisfield-Wolf Non-Fiction award in 2012, with the resolution that genocide and racial feuds rely on the momentum of linguistics.
To prevent acts of dehumanization, Smith boldly states in his book, “Moral outrage comes cheaply. It is more difficult, and surely more valuable, to address those features of the human condition that precipitated the tragedy.”
Smith strips away the fundamental components of the moral compass by underlining that as social bipedal primates, humans have an instinctual drive to defer from harming individuals of the same species. Nonetheless, history reflects a consistent deviance from that innate quality; governments enact genocides, religious groups excuse their carnage based on belief, and social prejudice excludes and torments targets that don’t abide by accepted practices.
Smith argues historical artifacts reflect an emboldened movement to distinguish the victimized group as a subhuman category — an animal that is prey or predator, a deadly parasite, or other unclean animal. One source in his book references Sam Keen’s “Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination,” which displays a variety of propaganda illustrations that the media consumed in different eras.
“When we dehumanize others, we attribute to them the essence of a non-human animal, that is, irrespective of how they appear, what they really are on the inside is something akin to a rat or a cockroach or a bloodthirsty, dangerous predator, or whatever,” remarked Smith to Current Affairs magazine.
The dehumanization framework allows perpetrators to override moral roadblocks to inflict harm, or even worse, to influence others to take part in cruelty. Smith continues his commitment to the theory of dehumanization in his latest book “Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization,” where he further refines his hypothesis.
Dehumanizing rhetoric still echoes in contemporary news outlets from Politico quoting Israel’s ambassadors comment mentioning the “Western world must stand with Israel as it fights the ‘bloodthirsty animals’ of Hamas,” to the striking title from The Atlantic stating “Trump says democrats want immigrants to ‘infest’ the U.S.” Countless other examples are easy to locate with a couple clicks of a keyboard, leading us to question the ulterior motives of apathetic driven metaphors. How does one handle a threatening animal or a pest infestation? Extermination is a consequential action.
As researchers note in the National Library of Medicine, “The use of metaphors to shape public opinion has been a precursor to mass violence for centuries because cultural violence depicted through day-to-day language can legitimize direct violence.”
As history suggests, we have used language as the propeller to justify what happens to outliers instead of ethics.
