David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D.

Less Than Human:
Self-Deception in the Imagining of Others

Introduction

I practice impure philosophy. Impure philosophy is the opposite of pure philosophy, that form of philosophizing that abstracts away from the world as it is, ignoring local empirical details in the quest for absolute truth. Pure philosophy is not especially concerned with how things actually are; it is concerned with the ways that things could possibly be – what is true ‘at every possible world’, as we say in the jargon of the trade. In contrast, impure philosophers are not especially interested in what is true at every possible world. Rather, they are interested in what is true at this world – the actual world in which human beings live and breathe and struggle.

The best summary of the impure philosophical attitude that I have found comes from John Dewey’s seminal 1917 essay “The need for a recovery in philosophy”. Dewey wrote that:

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men’ (46).

Dewey believed that for philosophy is to be of service to humanity it must “identify itself with questions which actually arise in the vicissitudes of life” (ibid.). This position, with which I heartily agree, will seem achingly pedestrian to some of my purist brethren. For example, the British philosopher Jonathan Barnes was recently asked by Eurozine magazine whether he thought that philosophy has anything to offer non-philosophers. He remarked that:

I don’t believe that professional philosophy has much to offer non-philosophers on non-philosophical matters. Why should it have? 

Of course, some philosophers do like to think that aspects of their professional studies have or should have a relevance to Real Life; and some of them do like to address the Common Man. They do it, I hope, for the money – and good luck to them (quoted in Eurozine, May 9 2008).

The Biological Roots of War

As an impure philosopher, I am concerned to find worthwhile questions to explore. By this I mean that I am interested in finding questions the answers to which have the potential to improve the human condition, and which a philosopher might make some contribution towards answering.

The question that has preoccupied me most for the past several years is the question of what it is about human nature that causes us to go to war. At any given moment, there are numerous wars raging all over the globe. Right now, your tax dollars are directly supporting two of them, and indirectly supporting God knows how many others. Over the last century alone, around 200 million human beings have died at the hands of their conspecifics in war. The majority of these, about two-thirds, have been civilians, and many more have died in the massive displacement of populations and the destruction of social infrastructures that occur in the wake of war.

The horrors of war are themselves part of a bigger picture that include our tendency to enslave and oppress members of our own kind, or consign them to a hell of hunger and disease. This is a grim picture. As Freud observed, just a few years before Hitler’s rise to power in Germany:

Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked…. As a result their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him (1930: 111).

I bring a basic methodological assumption to this question. It is an assumption that you may or may not accept, but which seems to be to be obvious correct. I assume that any account of human nature ought to draw on the resources of evolutionary biology. We human beings are animals. More specifically, we are primates. As such, we are part of the great epic of evolution that began with the first organic molecules, around four billion years ago.

Biologically speaking, Homo sapiens are one of the new kids on the block. The hominid line branched off from the primate family tree about six million years ago, and anatomically modern human beings made their debut only about 200,000 years ago. Our earliest ancestors managed to survive in the face of overwhelming odds. They were small, relatively weak, and were stalked by terrifying predators for whom they were easy prey. However, by dint of their remarkable intelligence and their knack for social cooperation, our prehistoric forebears eventually turned the tables on their nonhuman adversaries and become ecologically dominant. In the course of this transformation, hominids became their own worst enemies. Long after most of the large predators that posed a threat to human life were subdued or driven to extinction, human beings continued to pose a formidable threat to one another.

The human propensity for mass violence is a product of the way that evolution fashioned our species. Those ancestral males who were able to work together cooperatively and who had a taste for killing their neighbors were able to rob their neighbors of resources – territory, fertile females and material culture. This process enhanced the reproductive success of the warriors and, in accord with the inexorable logic of natural selection, caused their genes to spread through the population. As a result, the penchant for collective violence became a fixture of human nature.

The Horror of Killing

Human beings are not just killer apes. We also have a strong aversion to killing one another. Some students of human nature treat this as evidence that we are essentially peaceful creatures, and regard our violent side as a superficial artifact of culture. Others doubt that our vaunted aversion to war is genuine. Among these was Mark Twain, who wrote in his iconoclastic essay “Man’s place in the animal world” that:

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, war. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out…and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel…. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for the ‘universal brotherhood of mankind’ with his mouth (1896: 210)

There can be no doubt that human beings often hypocritically claim that they are committed to peace, and that this is something that we ought to be reminded of again and again by gadflies like Twain. However, we ought to bear in mind that sometimes behavior that appears to be intentionally hypocritical is the outcome of self-deception. Sometimes our words do not cohere with our actions (or with one another) because of psychological factors that prevent us from recognizing our own inconsistencies. If we allow that human beings can be genuinely and unconsciously inconsistent, then we can allow that they might both pursue war and abhor it. If this is the case – as I believe it is – then we need to work out why it is that human beings are ambivalent about war, and what it is that prevents them from recognizing their ambivalence.

There are several streams of evidence that suggests that human have an aversion to taking human life. It is comparatively rare for human beings to kill one another. Even in El Salvador, which is currently the homicide capital of the world, there are only 5.3 incidents per 100,000 people. In fact, more people commit suicide each year than die at the hands of others (there are, on average 16 suicides per 100,000 people worldwide). In war, too, killing is hard to do – at least when it is up-close and personal. Although in the movies soldiers kill one another without batting an eyelid, taking the life of another person is difficult for a psychologically normal human being to do. This was highlighted by the controversial, larger-than-life US army historian S.L.A. ‘Slam’ Marshall, who wrote in his 1947 book Men Against Fire that:

The average and healthy individual…still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible for him to turn away from that responsibility (9).

Marshall claimed that during WWII and the Korean War only a small proportion of US infantrymen in combat actually fired their weapons. This led to a revamping of US military training, which came to focus more on getting soldiers to override their natural reluctance to kill. Although the empirical bona fides of Marshall’s work have come under fire in recent years, there is considerable evidence that the act of killing in combat is often psychologically problematic. One need only read soldiers’ accounts of killing in close combat to see this. The historian William Manchester’s WWII memoir Goodbye Darkness gives a vivid description of one such experience.

A feeling of disgust and self-hatred clotted darkly in my throat, gagging me. Jerking my head to shake off the stupor, I slipped a new fully loaded magazine into the butt of my .45. Then I began to tremble, and next to shake, all over. I sobbed in a voice still grainy with fear: ‘I’m sorry’. Then I threw up all over myself. I recognized the half-digested C-ration beans dribbling down my front, smelled the vomit above the cordite. Then I noticed another odor; I had urinated in my skivvies. I had become a thing of tears and twitchings and dirtied pants. I remember wondering dumbly: ‘Is that what they mean by conspicuous gallantry?’ (1980: 17-18).

Trembling, vomiting and incontinence are not unusual in combat, although they are not the sorts of phenomena portrayed in the movies or glorified in patriotic rhetoric. Manchester’s vignette also illustrates that fact that killing is especially difficult in close combat, when one cannot evade awareness of what one is doing. This stands in sharp contrast to the killing-at-a-distance which characterizes much of modern warfare, in which combatants know that that they are taking human life, but are shielded from the sights, sounds and smells that elicit these visceral reactions.

Another source of insight into our horror of lethal violence comes from the literature on so-called PTSD – the form psychological harm from which combat veterans often suffer. ‘PTSD’ is the latest psychiatric label for what in the past has been called ‘war neurosis’, ‘shell shock’, ‘battle fatigue’, ‘nostalgia’ and various other terms. What causes veterans’ PTSD? Most of us assume that it is the constant threat of violent death. However, research by the psychologist Barbara MacNair suggests that GIs who have killed in combat, or believe that they have done so, are especially prone to post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems that there is something about the act of killing that does violence to people’s minds. Retired US Army psychologist Lt. Col. David Grossman expresses this point very clearly:

Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, at watching as he dies due to your action combine to form the single most basic, important and potentially traumatic occurrence of war. If we understand this, then we understand the magnitude of the horror of killing in combat (1995: 31).

The War/Peace Paradox

We are confronted with a paradox, which the British philosopher Anthony Grayling calls the “war/peace paradox” (2008). Human beings are warlike animals with a horror of lethal violence. We inflict unspeakable atrocities upon our fellow human beings, while at the same time recoiling from and condemning such atrocities. How can this be explained? The answer, I think, lies in the cognitive evolution of our species and, in particular, in our capacity for imagination.

Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have strong inhibitions against killing members of their own communities but they do not hesitate to slaughter members of neighboring communities. In fact, male chimpanzees have been observed to form ‘commando units’ that penetrate into their neighbors’ territory searching for lone individuals to kill. Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham observes that:

During these raids on other communities, the attackers do as they do while hunting…except that the target ‘prey’ is a member of their own species. And their assaults…are marked by a gratuitous cruelty – tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, or drinking a victim’s blood – reminiscent of acts that among humans are unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war (1996).

Chimpanzees behave one way towards the members of their immediate community and in quite a different way towards outsiders. This “double standard” is reminiscent of human ethnocentrism, a term coined by the American anthropologist William Graham Sumner to describe a view of the world in which…

[O]ne’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it….each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders (1906: 13).

Sumner, and many other scholars that came after him, argued that ethnocentrism goes hand-in-hand with hostility towards outsiders. In fact, the word “hostile” comes from the Latin “hostis” which means “stranger”.

The relation of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that of hostility and war towards others-groups are correlative to each other…. Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood with, warlikeness without – all grow together…. Virtue consists in killing, plundering and enslaving outsiders (Ibid.: 12-13).

Notice that although there are striking similarities between chimpanzee behavior and human xenophobia there are also important differences. Chimpanzees have an instinctive hostility to strangers, whereas human ethnocentrism is filtered through an ideological prism. Whereas chimpanzees respond aggressively to strangers, human beings conceptualize others as enemies. Human ethnocentrism brings a whole range of concepts to bear on group relations – concepts like “us” and “them”, “superior” and “inferior”, and “good” and “evil”. The deployment of such concepts gives human social relations their distinctive stamp, and differentiates them from the patterns of social relations found in other species. Although it is possible that chimpanzees possess rudimentary concepts, there is no evidence that they possess concepts of the sort that drive human ethnocentrism. But there was a time in the remote past when our ancestors operated with roughly the same mental horsepower as present-day chimpanzees, and probably had similar dispositions. These primitive hominins lived in small, mutually antagonistic groups and periodically sent bands of male raiders to attack and kill their neighbors. Eventually, the expansion of the hominin brain eventually caused this pattern of behavior to change, as our ancestors made the transition from chimpanzee-like to distinctively human modes of intergroup violence.

I think that this transition was driven by their development of the capacity for conceptual thought, which made it possible for prehistoric human beings to conceive of themselves and their neighbors as human beings, and therefore as members of the broader human community. Once this happened – and we know that it must have happened at some point – killing became more difficult, because once they were able to conceive of their neighbors as fellow human beings, our ancestors’ violent inclinations clashed with the equally powerful biological inhibition against killing members of ones own community. Clearly, the emergence of conceptual thought was not enough to prevent our species from indulging in the recurring nightmare of war. This suggests that we discovered a way to circumvent our inhibitions against killing. The question is, how did we manage to do this? Answering this question should provide us with crucial insights into what it is about human nature that makes war possible, and how we might go about preventing it.

The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume seems to have been the first person to provide the hint of an answer. Hume believed that ethical judgment is driven by feeling rather than reason, a theory nowadays known as “emotivism”. He suggested that when we say that an act is morally good, we are simply expressing a feeling of approval, and when judge one as morally bad, we are expressing disapproval. He held that these “moral sentiments” are based on the natural tendency to resonate with the joys and sufferings of others that he called “sympathy”. However, Hume also argued that our feelings of sympathy are not distributed impartially; they are skewed by what psychologists nowadays call “cognitive biases”, and it is clear from the following passage from his 1740 masterpiece A Treatise of Human Nature that he thought that these cognitive biases play a role in the psychology of war.

When our nation is at war with any other, we detest them under the character of cruel, perfidious, unjust and violent: but always esteem ourselves and allies equitable, moderate and merciful. If the general of our enemies be successful, ‘tis with difficulty we allow him the figure and character of a man (1740: 397, emphasis added).

This passage seems to be the first appearance of the notion of dehumanizing the enemy. Although the idea of dehumanization is often invoked in the social-science literature, it is never credited to Hume (it is usually attributed to the psychoanalyst Erik H. Eriksen, who referred to it as “pseudospeciation”) and is rarely given much analysis. I think that dehumanization is an extremely important phenomenon, and goes a long way towards accounting for the war/peace paradox. If we consider it in the context of the big picture of human evolution that I described above, its significance becomes obvious. Dehumanization is a way of undoing the awareness that you and your enemy are members of a single human community. As such, it is a way of overriding inhibitions against lethal aggression. Imagining the other as non-human makes killing or brutalizing him morally permissible.

Although this seems broadly right, there is clearly a lot of detail that needs filling in. First of all, the idea of dehumanization presupposes the capacity for self-deception. To dehumanize others we need to get ourselves to believe a falsehood, either by pulling the wool over our own eyes or opening ourselves to the propaganda promulgated by political and religious authorities. Now, the concept of self-deception is in many ways a problematic one, and there is a substantial philosophical literature addressing it. I do not propose to go into this literature here, but will assume that self-deception is an intelligible notion. The philosophical and psychological literatures tacitly assume that self-deception is a pathological state: a deformation of rationality. However, biologically oriented writers tend to take a different view, treating self-deception as adaptive – as a sort of cognitive gimmick that helps us deal with the world more effectively. The idea, which began to gain currency in the 1970s, is that self-deception helps human beings deceive one another more effectively – for a sincere liar is more persuasive than an insincere one (Smith, 2004). The view expressed here is closer to that of the sociobiologists than it is to that of the mainstream philosophers and psychologists. If I am right, the sort of self-deception involved in dehumanization is adaptive rather than pathological, not because it makes us better liars, but because it gives us greater behavioral flexibility, allowing us to perform actions that would otherwise be impossible for us to perform. The fact that these are often horrible, destructive actions is neither here nor there.

To really get a grasp of what is going on we need to look more closely at the specific form of self-deception that comes into play when people dehumanize one another. I think that the best way to do this is to draw on a concrete example. Consider the following excerpt from a poem written in 1675 by Captain Wait Winthrop, a Massachusetts Puritan, describing Native Americans as vermin and urging their genocide (cited in Chalk & Jonassohn, 1990: 194).

But humbled be, and thou shalt see these Indians soon will dy.
A Swarm of Flies, they may arise, a Nation to Annoy,
Yea Rats and Mice, or Swarms of Lice, a Nation may destroy.

What was Winthrop getting at when he described Indians as vermin? Clearly, he did not mean to imply that they are indistinguishable from rats, mice or lice. Winthrop was not psychotic: he was aware that Native Americans do not look like vermin. So, in referring to them as vermin, he must have been referring to something other than their visible form, some deeper, hidden characteristic that he believed the Indians possessed.
If I am right, Winthrop’s position was based on the distinction between essential and accidental properties. In the philosophical literature, distinction between essential and accidental properties goes back to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle argued that there is a difference between those features that make a thing what it is (its essential properties), and those features that it merely happens to have (its accidental properties). This distinction has remained important in philosophy right up to the present, particularly in discussions about the extension of what are called “natural kind terms”. Natural kind terms are expressions like “water” that refer to real the categories of things that are independent of human classificatory schemes. Chemical kinds like water provide useful examples. Our word “water” refers to the stuff water. But how does it do this? According to one tradition, associated with Bertrand Russell, the word “water” is shorthand for a description – something like “the clear, colorless liquid that fills bathtubs, flows in rivers” and so on. The idea that natural kind terms abbreviate descriptions was overtaken in the late 20th century by a different view, associated with the philosophers Saul Kripke and Hillary Putnam, who argued that “water” names H2O: being H2O is what makes something water, not the fact that it is a clear, colorless liquid, etc. It would be possible for there to be stuff that fits the description of water – it is a clear, colorless liquid that flows in rivers, etc. – but which is not water because it is not H2O (in Putnam’s famous fantasy, this is the case on a distant planet called “Twin Earth”). So, we can say that water is essentially H2O, and only accidentally a clear, colorless liquid.

The distinction between essential and accidental properties runs a lot deeper then the ruminations of professional philosophers. Research by cognitive anthropologists suggests human beings have an innate tendency to distinguish between the essential and accidental properties of animals. Furthermore, the notion of essence that they spontaneously use is closer to the Kripke/Putnam theory than it is to the Russellian one. As Scott Atran notes:

People in all cultures… consider this essence responsible for the organism’s identity as a complex entity governed by dynamic internal processes that are lawful even when hidden. The essence maintains the organism’s integrity even as it causes the organism to grow, change form, and reproduce. For example, a tadpole and a frog are conceptualized as the same animal even though they look and behave very differently and live in different places (2005: 145).

The idea that living things have something hidden within them that makes them what they are requires one to posit the existence of something that cannot be perceived by the senses but which nevertheless determines what a thing is. In what might be called the folk-theory of essences, the essence of an animal is its “soul”: it is the soul of an animal, rather than its outward appearance, that makes it the kind of animal that it is. This framework suggests that appearances can be deceptive: creature might appear to be one sort of being while having the soul of another (We find this kind of mismatch between essential and accidental properties in the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, in which an object that has all of the accidental properties of a small wafer is taken to have the essential properties of the body of Christ).

The work of investigators like Atran shows that it is natural for human beings to think in terms of essential and accidental properties. It follows that it is natural for us to think that an entity can precisely resemble an entity of some type and yet lack the essence that would make it an entity of that type. Bringing this to bear on the topic of dehumanization, it seems to make sense to think of Wait Winthrop’s remarks in the following way. Winthrop believed that although Native Americans had the same accidental properties as human beings – they looked just like human beings – they lacked a human essence, a human soul. Instead, they had the souls of vermin, and it was therefore morally permissible to exterminate them, just as one would exterminate rats, flies or lice.
If we look at the patterns of dehumanization in the discourse of war and other forms of brutality a definite pattern begins to emerge. Not only are human beings thought to lack a human soul, they are imagined to possess the soul of some non-human animal. The species selected is invariably one that merits killing: it is a dangerous predator, a game animal, or a source of filth and infection. Here are just a few examples. Many more can be found in my book The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War (2007).

• According to an SS pamphlet the Jew “looks human…but his spirit is lower than that of an animal. A terrible chaos runs rampant in this creature, an awful urge for destruction, primitive desires, unparalleled evil, a monster, subhuman” (cited in Smith, 2007: 194).
• British General William Slim remarked of the Japanese that “we would hunt them down and when, desperate and rabid, they turned at bay, we killed them” (Ibid.: 194)
• During WWI Australian servicemen called shooting the enemy “potting kangaroos” while their British and American counterparts spoke of shooting “human rabbits” (Ibid.: 199).
• The March, 1945 issue US Marine Corps magazine Leatherneck ran an illustration of a grotesque parasite called Louseous Japanicus and explained that the marines were responsible for “the giant task of extermination” and that “the breeding grounds around the Tokyo area…must be completely annihilated” (Ibid.: 209)
• A Rwandan radio broadcast in March 1994 addressed the Tutsi population as follows: “You cockroaches must know that you are made of flesh. We won’t let you kill. We will kill you” (Gupta, 2001)

Conclusion

If I am right, war depends on our ability to overcome a contradiction in our natures. We must find a way to override our horror of taking human life. This is done in two ways. We can shield ourselves from the consequences of our actions by using long-range weapons that do not confront the warrior with the specific cues that elicit horror and disgust (as we speak, the US military is developing robot-soldiers to do the dirty work of war). Alternately, we can psychologically distance ourselves by deceiving ourselves into thinking that our enemies to not possess a human essence.

It follows that if we wish to constrain our dangerous, warlike tendencies we ought to work against the distancing mechanisms that make war possible. We ought to confront ourselves and the world with the devastating human consequences of war in as graphic a manner as possible, and we should be intolerant of efforts to dehumanizing other human beings. Although we will never eliminate our violent dispositions, we can, perhaps, shore up those tendencies that keep our violent dispositions in check.

References

Atran, S. (2005) Strong versus weak adaptationism in cognition and language. In P. Caruthers et al. (eds.) The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chalk, F. and Jonassohn, K. (1990) The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analysis and Case Studies. Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press.

Dewey, J. (1917) THe need for a recovery in philosophy. InThe Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 10, 1899-1924: Essays on Philosophy and Education, 1916-1917. J. Boydston and L. E. Hahn (eds.). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.

Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its discontents. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961.

Grayling, A. C. (2008) Paradox at the heart of our warring psyche. The Australian, Frbruary 27, 2008.

Grossman, D. (1996) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Bel Air, CA: Back Bay Books.

Gupta, D. (2001) Path to Collective Madness: A Study in Social Order and Political Pathology. New York: Praeger.

Hume, D. (1740) A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Penguin, 1985.

Manchester, W. (1980) Goodbye Darkness: A Memoire of the Pacific War. London: Dell.

Marshall, S. L. A. (1947) Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978.

Smith, D. L. (2004) Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind. New York: St. Martins Press.

Smith, D. L. (2007) The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War. New York: St. Martins Press.

Sumner, W. (1906) Folkways: A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002.

Twain, M. (1896) Man’s place in the animal world. In Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays, 1891-1910. New York: Library of America, 1992.