Less Than Human [Hardcover]

Professor Smith states in the Preface that, "In this book, I will argue that dehumanization is a joint creation of biology, culture, and the architecture of the human mind. Grasping its nature and dynamics requires that we attend to all three elements. Excluding any of them leaves us with a hopelessly distorted picture of what we are trying to comprehend." And by dehumanization, Professor Smith simply means that, "To dehumanize a person is to regard them as subhuman." Dehumanization doesn't mean to deny someone their individuality, to objectify them, to denigrate them, or even to treat them cruelly (although that certainly does happen). So, it is to this end that Professor Smith sets about explaining the psychological roots of dehumanization.

Through 275 pages, divided into nine chapters, Smith examines such topics as the past thoughts of Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Pico, Paracelsus, Hume, and Kant; and modern thinkers such as Erik Erikson, Konrad Lorenz, E. O. Wilson, Jane Goodall, and Iranaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. He also analyzes themes like `The Great Chain of Being,' Slavery, Nazi's, and Genocide; "In this book, I will argue that when we dehumanize people we think of them as counterfeit human beings - creatures that look like humans, but who are not endowed with a human essence - and that this is possible only because of our natural tendency to think that there are essence-based natural kinds. This way of thinking doesn't come from "outside." We neither absorb it from our culture, nor learn it from observation. Rather, it seems to reflect our cognitive architecture - the evolved design of the human psyche." In regards to cognitive architecture, I think Professor Smith's strongest argument for why we dehumanize is based on our modularity of mind (best discussed in Robert Kurzban's book: Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, and also to a lesser extent in David Berreby's book: Us and Them: The Science of Identity).

In conclusion, Professor Smith certainly knows the material very well, and the book stays extremely focused on explaining what dehumanization means. I think Smith also shifts gears from hard scientific evidence to mere speculation very smoothly and with plenty of prudence and caution; he certainly takes a skeptical attitude, which I appreciated. The only thing that irked me a bit about the book was Chapter 6: Race. Here is a quote: "A more scientific-sounding version of the same idea [that human essence is carried in the blood,] is that essences are located in one's DNA (a notion helped along, no doubt, by the folk-theory that racial essences are transmitted in seminal fluid). Although it has a veneer of scientific respectability, this DNA theory is only marginally less baseless than the theories about blood and milk, for, as we have seen, conventional racial categories are fold categories rather than scientific ones, and don't have any genetic justification." Now, I don't know what the real answer is, but I know there are a lot of (scientifically well-versed) individuals who might find the idea that DNA has nothing to do with 'race' a bit of a stretch. Also, I would have liked to see Professor Smith mention Malthusianism (the very real, and very omnipresent struggle for existence due to scarce resources), and give it a modicum of attention because, to my way of thinking, it is really the primary evolutionary reason we dehumanize others in the first place. Nonetheless, I think this is an exceptional book and I highly recommend it.

This is a wonderful history of people abusing other people. It covers a vast range of cases, from local to international, from ancient times to now. It digs into the psychological mechanisms more than trivially.
But it seems to me to be based on a false premise. The author holds, or seems to hold, that people abusing other groups really dehumanize them and treat them like the most hated kinds of animals, and thus can torture, rape, enslave, and exterminate them with fairly guilt-free consciences. The only problem with this is that nobody treats real rats, pigs, cockroaches and snakes the way we treat enemy humans. We kill the rats and so on as quickly as possible, period. Nobody keeps a rat in prison and systematically tortures it for weeks. Moreover, as Roy Baumeister pointed out in his great book EVIL, it requires exquisite empathy and understanding of common humanity to work out the horrible tortures and abuses that people figure out for each other.
Conversely, it is very easy to see where people DO learn how to torment others: family and neighborhood violence. The countless horrible cases of torture, control, and abuse in Smith's book are indistinguishable from what goes on in lots of families. A nurse I know, helping a Vietnam vet suffering PTSD, heard him say of battle: "it was chaos and shouting, everything out of control...like when my old man got drunk and started beating on my mom."
So I think the dehumanizing labels that genociders and slavers use are more like the name-calling in a family or barroom or schoolyard brawl than like real animal labels. There is enormous pressure on genociders and slavers to make the "others" as far from them, psychologically, as possible--but common humanity does set a limit. We can't really think of them as rats and flies. If we did, we would at least kill them quickly and cleanly instead of devising ever more awful ways to drag the process out.

I found this book, "Less than Human," in our Library's new acquisitions section and thought it worth a look. However, a quick look turned into an all night read as I discovered myself fully absorbed and engaged with Dr. David Smith's fascinating work. "Less than Human" addresses our ability to dehumanize our fellow man thereby allowing us to perpetrate all manner of violence upon him, from war to outright genocide. Dr. Smith makes it clear that he is investigating the processes behind dehumanization, cultural, biological and psychological, that lead to humans treating others as less-than-real people and is not exploring the extensive assortment of additional concepts this wide ranging term encompasses, such as the objectification of women or the social marginalization of specific people. One aspect of the book that I enjoyed was its balanced approach. Often many of the works emanating from academia have an inherent anti-Western bias, but "Less than Human" is free from such indoctrination instead dealing with dehumanization as a worldwide characteristic, originating in per-historic societies and displayed in both tribe and polis. In addressing dehumanization, Dr. Smith uses a vast array of investigative tools to set the stage, such as specific historical illustrations (like Sub-Saharan slavery and the Armenian genocide), evolutionary explanations (citing Jane Goodall's field work with chimpanzees) and explicit psychological confessions (such as quotes from fellow soldiers like WWI stormtrooper Ernst Junger). After outlining the problem, in the later half of his book, Dr. Smith takes a more detailed look at the actual mechanisms of dehumanization, such as its essential racial component and uniquely Homo sapiens quality. Though the reader will find points of disagreement with Dr. Smith's seminal study (for example, I don't think the divide between man and animal are as liminal and that our pseudo-laws, such as the Nuremberg Laws, Dhimmitude or Jim Crow, provide a shameful veneer of legality that somewhat complicates outright dehumanization), I feel most readers will be impressed with Dr. Smith's reasoning and argumentation. Though a scholarly endeavor, Dr. Smith has created an engrossing, readable and compelling work that is directly relevant to our daily lives. As he states: "The architecture of our minds makes us vulnerable to these forms of persuasion. Images like these speak to something deep inside us. If you still believe that you are the exception, and are immune from these forces, I hope that by the end of the book you will have embraced a more realistic assessment of your capacity for evil."