David Livingstone Smith on Dehumanization

well this is the video podcast conversation for multi faith matters and i'm privileged today to have as my guest david livingston smith i've appreciated uh his work in the past i've read one of his prior books and i'll be talking about that in just a moment we're going to be talking today about content from his most recent book on inhumanity and i'm going to read his bio from the inside cover of that david livingstone smith is professor of philosophy at the university of new england in bidford maine he has written or edited nine books including on in humanity including less than human why we demean enslave and exterminate others that was published by saint martin's press in 2011 and it was that prior book that first put david on my radar and i was excited to see his follow-up volume uh on in humanity and today we're going to talk to him about dehumanization in the context of evangelicals and multi-faith engagement primarily in the american context david welcome to the podcast oh thank you john thank you for having me here uh let's begin by defining our subject matter what do we what do you mean by dehumanization yeah so the the word demonization entered the english language uh in the early 19th century around 1819 and it's used to mean lots and lots of different things so if you you know if you google it you'll find literally millions of hits and then if you go to those you'll find that the word is used in lots of different ways sometimes we use it just to describe something that we think is wrong or bad wrong treatment or bad treatment of others or the use of certain sorts of slurs and so on i use the word humanization a very particular way which is to refer to a kind of attitude and that attitude is looking down on others as less than human creatures so you're sort of expelling them from the the category of the human and and thinking of them as as subhumans now viewers may be wondering why we're talking about this topic in the context of multi-faith encounters with evangelicals just by way of background i mentioned before you and i started this conversation here in the podcast that i did five years worth of grant research to the louisville institute and two of those years included looking at social psychology and social neuroscience and during that process it was dehumanization that showed up on the radar for me and i was intrigued and i think this needs to be a part of the broader evangelical conversation so my hope is that whether you're a pastor or just somebody sitting in the pew that we can look at this uncomfortable topic and realize how it is a problem in our society and for evangelicals and other christians not just in the past but in the present so i appreciate you being here to help us unpack that and having to find it for us can you uh talk a little bit about how you got involved in this subject of studying and researching and writing on it now two books on the subject yeah well that has two sides so one side has to do with my my personal history my history as a human being uh i grew up in the deep south in the 1950s and 60s my parents moved from new york uh to southwest florida which back in the day was was really deep south culturally and uh this was a a world in which i didn't quite fit in so if i can give you a little bit of background sure my my mother uh was was jewish her parents were jewish refugees from eastern europe my father came from an old southern missionary family in fact he was born to missionaries in brazil so this this world of the deep south was quite comfortable for him less comfortable for my mother now this was the days of segregation there was brutal racism all around and it was not something you had to you know infer the existence of it was quite blatant and explicit um and and as a little kid i had to make sense of this like and as a child you know when you see a sign on the beach saying dogs and negro is not allowed it it just seems wrong right it just seems strong now in that that task of understanding this world uh was greatly helped by my gran my maternal grandparents so my maternal grandparents would come and visit us in the summers in florida they lived in new york and eventually moved down so i spent a lot of my childhood in this extended family with my maternal grandparents and my grandmother in particular was a brilliant self-educated woman and although she had to leave school at around the age of 14 to to work to help support herself and her brothers she uh she she was just astonishing and one thing she knew a great deal about are some of the darker sides of history the history of anti-semitism of the extermination of native americans and the brutal oppression of african americans and she explained a lot of that to me and so you know as i grew and i eventually stumbled into being a philosopher uh i carried that experience with me now that's the one of the two sides the other side is i i was working on a book around about uh 2006 on war and human nature called the most dangerous animal and when i was working on that book i came across all this wartime propaganda dehumanizing propaganda propaganda that presented the enemy not as a fellow human being but as vermin or dangerous predators or things of that nature and i discovered that this phenomenon dehumanization was really not dealt with anywhere much outside of social psychology and i was not entirely satisfied with what the social psychologists were saying about it so a friend convinced me to write a book and that was my my 2011 less than human book which was the first single authored book i think still well now one of two single authored books on dehumanization in the english language and i've been studying it ever since because i think it's you know demonization is bound up with the most terrible things we do to other human beings we look at genocide we look at war we look at the atrocities that unfortunately human beings have perpetrated on one another and which litter our history dehumanization is very very often a significant contributing factor um so i'm still on it i mean there's there's a lot of work to be done and it's work which is becoming increasingly pressing and serious given the trajectory that the world is taking unfortunately well you've defined it for us it's moved from the more abstract to the more concrete to give people some examples to get their their minds around can you share a few examples historically of decomposition things that people may be familiar with and maybe they're not sure um so let me give you two examples one uh in at least in the aspect i'm going to describe it a little bit distant in history but not in geography and the other happening now so the first one which i use a lot as an example when i'm talking about humanization is the attitudes of many white americans to black americans particularly black american men uh in the aftermath of the failure of reconstruction in the late 19th century so you know reconstruction basically federal troops move into the south to protect the enslaved people who were now freed at least ostensibly uh and a deal was struck the outcome of a contested presidential election and that led to the federal troops leaving and it led to black people in the south being effectively re-enslaved through various means uh now during this period now from let's say well the first let's say from 1890 into well up into the 20th century lynching was widely practiced three-quarters of the victims of lynching were were black people lynched by white people and lynching is something which most americans don't quite understand because they're normally exposed to how it's presented in the movies and on tv and that's very very sanitized so what lynching really involved almost always was bodily mutilation hours of torture and and then execution now i've my research focuses on what's called spectacle inching spectacle lynchings were lynchings attended by uh thousands of spectators they were treated as festive occasions whole families would come to watch a human being being tortured for hours and then typically well not necessarily typically but very often burnt alive at the end and i i can't stress too much how these were regarded as as festivals in fact one scholar has compared them to rituals of human sacrifice schools were closed bars were closed railroad companies laid on extra trains to transport spectators body parts were taken as souvenirs and sometimes handed down in a family for generations professional photographers were on hand to photograph the event and these were photographs were sold as postcards it's horrible beyond belief what interests me is how these events were described and how they were represented in the press particularly the southern press but not exclusively the southern press so they were described often as barbecues so when a human being was burned to death it was a barbecue and that tells us right away that the victim is seen as less than human but in the in the press we find the victims described as monsters as beasts and very often as d as demonic beings as monsters and demons and fiends and so on so there's an image of of the victim as less than human as subhuman and see that has a function that has and this is so important um the way i think about dehumanization is in relation to a feature of human nature and that is that it's actually not that easy for us to do this sort of harm to others we have inner obstacles that's part of being a human being um so you know to look into someone eye someone's eyes and kill them is very very hard to and for most people if they're in a position where they have to do that it it it harms them it haunts them for a lifetime uh there are always a few that don't care so dehumanization is a way that human beings have developed over thousands of years to sort of short-circuit that response that prevents us from doing these sorts of things to our fellow human beings right so in in then in presenting uh black people particularly black men as less than human beings what that did was it freed people up to perform these acts and and legitimated them i mean if they're monsters and demons it's our responsibility to to dispatch them right they're evil they're bad to the bone they're evil beings and that's very very often how demonization works and certainly the most toxic forms of humanization which i call demonizing dehumanization we find these elements in place so so that's that's one and you know this image of the demonic uh person the demonic black man has you don't have to use the word demon to demonize someone right so nowadays it's often cast in the form of criminality essentially criminal people that's like a secular version of demon and demonic so the the other example i wanted to give was the uh the genocide in myanmar and this this genocide or ethnic cleansing some people preferred to call it and involved all of the atrocities that we associate with um with genocide you know torture whole-scale murder rape and and the movement of populations you know so refugees moving into these terrible refugee camps the largest in the world it's people from from myanmar um and and this was largely perpetrated by militant buddhist monks so i i know because i'm speaking to evangelicals i want to emphasize that religion doesn't keep you from getting your hands dirty here so in the american south it was you know overwhelmingly christian right the south then as now is overwhelmingly christian in myanmar it was it was and is radical buddhist monks who um dehumanized the muslim minority so in myanmar the the westernmost state of myanmar is called rakhine state and there's a long historical backstory which i won't bore you with uh it's it's largely muslim and um and buddhist monks have promoted the idea that muslims are demonic they're murderous they're rapists they're you know it's the same old story we find it again and again and again and again but also they're subhuman they breed like uh an invasive species of carp they um they are reincarnations of vermin and so on and so on and so on so in both cases we have the dehumanization of others as a sort of greasing the wheels of cruelty and atrocity i appreciate you sharing those examples unfortunately you could have cited many more and i yeah and i think it's important to recognize that uh religion often does play a part it can be used as a legitimating factor including for christianity i think the christian and evangelical audience needs to wrestle with that and come to grips with that and stop and ask ourselves how have we not lived up to the highest ideals of our own religious tradition and how can we do that when dehumanizing dehumanization comes about so let's shift to consideration of christian history a little bit more and how that has taken place um can you share some examples historically of how i'm sure i've done that with jews and so on can you speak to that sure um i'll give i'll give an extended example okay and but i i first just would like to respond to something that you said you know how can uh christians whose ideals are very different become embroiled in this sort of practice well the answer is very simple christians are human beings and as human beings we are vulnerable to this way of thinking we're we're all we're all crack vessels right right yeah you know we we we are unable to elevate ourselves beyond the human condition so that's something we have to deal with um okay so this is an example i developed very extensively in my next book which uh the publisher now is wanting to play around with the title but the title will probably be called making monsters and this has to do with uh christian anti-semitism or rather the history of anti-semitism in europe and and beyond so um and and please you know cut me off if i'm going into too much historical detail so uh early on christianity becomes the official religion of the roman empire and whereas christians had been persecuted before this point by pagans at this point it starts shifting around and christians start persecuting pagans now jews have a very peculiar position in this world because jews aren't pagans but they're not christians and they have a particular relationship judaism is a particular relationship to christianity um so the really influential person in this early period was was augustine of hippo known to catholics of course is saint augustine and he he argued that jews should not be persecuted they should be allowed to practice their religion unlike pagans um but what the heck something just fell pardon me that's okay okay what was it it sounded like it was back in your room it's talking to my wife there okay um okay so um uh but but live in a in a condition of degradation right so the idea of preserving jews was it would make good propaganda for converting pagans because it kind of testified to the historical bonafides of christianity so the relationship between jews and christians was pretty stable for a very very long time um and whatever you know there were some very anti-semitic uh fathers of the church but it probably really didn't affect relations between ordinary people neighbor and neighbor and so on this begins begins to change at the end of the 11th century with the first crusade um you know there were three waves of crusaders that went east to win back the holy land for christianity from the muslims and the third of that wave decided well we'll kill the infidel within and slaughter lots of jews many jews committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of of the crusaders uh then i'm you know i'm sp i'm kind of jumping over a lot of history but the crucial period of history here is actually the 14th century there had been growing racialization of jews in europe mostly as a grassroots movement so on the whole the church made efforts to protect jews but there was a grass roots movement within christianity which they started to see jews as an alien race as maybe subhuman that all sorts of beliefs like jews had tails and they they exuded a foul smell and and as it developed were satanic in league with the devil and so on and this really really got bad with the bubonic plague uh pandemic of the middle of the 14th century jews were accused of being in league with muslims and trying to destroy christianity by poisoning the water supplies and that was the cause of the plague and this is when the so-called blood libel really really took off it was an older idea but christians developed the idea that jews engaged in human sacrifice in particular kidnapped christian children drained them of their blood and mixed the blood with the matzo dough for the annual passover meal so this led to endless persecution and and in one form another persisted now this is very very important so initially you know the demonic jew was fundamentally a religious le-toned idea in christian europe of course in the middle ages uh religion saturated everything right um but it persisted and then was revived it was revived by proto-fascist groups in the late 19th and early 20th century one of which was the national socialists so that the nazis were in the aftermath of it was really the aftermath of world war one when populations were really under stress you know germany had been brought to its knees was paying terrible reparations to france and the rest of the world uh many many many young men were were dead or or or incapacitated from the war and then there was the flu pandemic right sweeping through europe it was a terrible time and when when times are bad like that these sorts of racist and humanizing ideologies start getting traction because people look for someone to blame and so all of these medieval um ideas were revived in nazi propaganda so hitler in mankath talks about jews as a plague i mean it's a it's a revival of the bubonic plague charge uh the the he talks about the jewish disease in nazi speeches you can see jews as being described quite overtly as demonic you know enemies of everything good and decent and of course then jews became associated in nazi propaganda with vermin with disease-carrying vermin with rats and with weiss and with typhus um so there's that whole trajectory which begins it's very important it begins with religious ideology and then it spreads it proliferates in in a more secular context in the um in the 20th century and beyond because these ideas which originated way back then uh within a christian framework at least an ostensibly christian framework are are still very much alive right once these things get rooted you see they don't go away very easily so during the same period from from like the late 11th century we also have the demonization of muslims by christians right because all this stuff really starts with the first crusade right um and there the the literature is not as extensive at least the literature that i have pursued but muslims are explicitly um sometimes described as monstrous beings monstrous evil beings they're demonized and of course a lot of that stuff unfortunately is still around so these these groups of people with different religious practices and convictions are all too often conceived of and represented as evil evil demonic or quasi-demonic beings that can often lead to bloodshed i think all that is is tremendously important to reflect upon i think the idea of the monstrosity of the other the religious other is tremendously important i work uh not only in inter-religious conflict but also monster theory monster studies i'm one of the co-editors for the peer-reviewed journal of gods and monsters and uh i would love to see a book that was done maybe your book will be a step in that direction that brings together monster theory and interreligious conflict and dehumanization and it's important to remember that uh this is not just something that happened in the past as a part of my grant research we looked at metaphors that evangelicals were using to talk about religious others and i'll just mention a few of those if folks are interested they can request a copy of this pat robertson on the 700 club referred to uh muslims as a pathogen an infection uh yen pat robertson talked about uh buddhists as a mild contagion we should stay away from janet mefford on her show janet meffer today in 2012 in response to a sikh giving a prayer at a republican political gathering uh referred to that as a syncretism that is kind of seeping under the door like a gas so in poison don richardson a evangelical author referred to the quran in its version version as a food an assassin adds to poison as a disguise and to disguise a deadly taste we could go on and on so there's the metaphors of disease contagion and then to connect with to what you just said a few moments ago there's both the metaphor of the demonic and literal demonization uh very vines on cnn in 2002 islam was founded by muhammad a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives so there's a literal demonization of the religious others so these are all things within the the broader evangelical christian social media kind of thing that that language i mean i hate to say it but that language could come right out of minecraft really good there's a wonderful book by a scholar named felicity rash r-a-s-h about the the metaphors in mankind and you can just look that i mean it's it's it's it's indistinguishable that's that's scary stuff so one of the concerns i have is that we then as evangelicals uh take these metaphors and they become a part of the of the theology the way in which we baptize if you will negative attitudes which paves the way for negative actions towards religious others sure sure yes so these are not just ways of talking they're not just ways of talking you know if you use that sort of language it encourages people to conceive of the other as as less than human and is dangerously less than human um look here's something that's really important i think for all of us to understand that by and large the architects of genocide genocidal violence and similar forms of violence think of themselves as doing good they think of themselves as ridding the world of evil so having moral convictions isn't always a safeguard against performing profoundly devastatingly immoral actions and you know you don't have to spill blood to harm people you can contribute to an atmosphere in which people are in which blood is spilled or an atmosphere in which people are diminished and they're they're they're inwardly heard and that that comes very very easy to us so i think it's it's very very extraordinarily important for evangelicals but not only evangelicals for all of us right i'm an atheist um it's just as important for me as it is to to those whom i'm addressing now to to understand that as mere human beings we are vulnerable to falling into these ways of talking in these ways of thinking and therefore vulnerable to perpetrating harm perpetrating wrong we've only got just a couple more minutes here with the time limitations of zoom can you just take a couple of minutes and and maybe add on what uh expand a little bit how could we be more aware of our dehumanization and take steps to rehumanize others okay so here's here's the first thing monsters aren't real monsters are fictional right when you start thinking of others as monsters you know you're on fiction land you're in fiction land and even people who do terrible things i mean we're inclined to talk about hitler as a monster stalin as a monster no they're not monsters they're human beings and i think the proper attitude towards them is to gaze into the mirror they hold up to us of what we are capable of more broadly we need to understand history properly and it's not taught properly because all of us whoever we are our ancestors have blood on their hands um no no group of people is immune from that and once you recognize that you recognize that it's possible for us to do this again and again and again um so there's a an inward looking and a commitment to recognizing our own vulnerability to dehumanizing ways of thinking and part of that is understanding how our minds work that allows us to do these things and i talk about that in the book and the other is outward looking to to to not be tolerant of this kind of destructive rhetoric which incites people to violence to not be to call out dangerous speech in one's own community as well as in the community of others you know and you know be as morally committed to rectifying problems in one's own group as one is to rectifying those problems in the world at large unfortunately we're out of time david i appreciate i'm going to include a link to your fine book uh in the description for this podcast we also included on our recommended book list at multi-faith matters on our website thank you as we try to address uh key challenges to evangelicals as relate as we relate to a multi-faith world uh again i thank you so much for your work and thank you for your work this is very important work you're doing great thank you so much david okay bye now

Channel: Multi-faith Matters

Views: 478

Keywords: dehumanization, racism, multifaith, interfaith

Id: iIAMW3YAQsc

Length: 34min 25sec (2065 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020