David Livingstone Smith: Inside the Mind that Kills

David Livingstone Smith is associate professor of philosophy at the University of New England where he teaches on the philosophies of biology, ethics, metaphysics, mind, psychology and the history of philosophy.

He is co-founder and director of the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Studies. The Institute explores the interface between evolutionary biology and human nature. Smith is the author of two books — ‘Why We Lie’ and ‘The Most Dangerous Animal’. His next book on dehumanisation will be published later this year by St. Martin’s Press.

I nominate taking dehumanisation seriously as a key idea for the 21st Century. Let me explain.
There is a strange paradox at the heart of human nature. We humans are the most sociable creatures on earth, with a remarkable ability to cooperate with one another. This, combined with our equally remarkable intelligence, was responsible for the birth and development of civilisation, and therefore for the scientific, technological and cultural innovations that have transformed our lives over the past 10,000 years. And yet, our species also displays a more ominous side. Human beings are also creatures of unparalleled ferocity. No other animal is capable of the horrors — the wars, genocides, torture and oppression — that we have regularly visited upon our fellow human beings.

This is all the more perplexing because killing does not come easily to us. In fact, in order to cooperate so effectively, our species has had to develop powerful inhibitions against committing lethal violence. This is why homicide is comparatively rare (in fact, each year far more people take their own lives than are killed in war and homicide combined).

Even soldiers, who are rewarded for killing, find it difficult to kill in cold blood, especially in close combat. Looking another person in the eye, with a full awareness of his humanity, and then pulling the trigger, and blowing them away, is an intense traumatic experience. This is why soldiers sometimes vomit, weep, become incontinent, or tremble uncontrollably after their first kill. The alarming suicide rate amongst veterans, and the psychiatric symptoms that may haunt them for a lifetime, also testify to the degree to which the act of killing damages the killer. It is clear that human beings have a horror of killing as well as a fatal attraction to it, and it is tempting to suppose that one of these attitudes is more basic or authentic than the other. But the evidence points in quite a different direction.
There are compelling reasons to think that both violence and an aversion to violence are fundamental features of the human animal. Both are deeply rooted in our nature.

Mostly, our inhibitions keep the violent side in check, but when the balance between them is upset, the results can be devastating. Let me briefly describe an example. For a period of six weeks from December 1937 to January 1938, Japanese soldiers slaughtered, mutilated, raped, and tortured thousands of Chinese civilians. Honda Katsuichi’s harrowing book The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame describes many of the details of what happened. Katsuichi lets the perpetrators speak for themselves, and their accounts of the atrocities are so horrific that they are difficult to read.

For example, one veteran confessed that, because a woman’s crying infant was interfering with his rape of her he “took a living human child…an innocent baby that was just beginning to talk, and threw it into boiling water.” It is hard to imagine normal men behaving in this way. Try to imagine yourself doing it, and your mind will probably recoil in disgust. However, the soldiers who committed these atrocities were neither madmen nor monsters. They were, for the most part, ordinary people. People like you. The same is true of all the other mass atrocities that litter human history. The infernal ovens of Auschwitz, the mass graves at Srebrenica and the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea were all the handiwork of ordinary people.

These observations raise an extremely important question. What goes on in the human mind to make such brutality possible? Yoshio Tshuchiya, another Japanese veteran interviewed in Katsuichi’s book, gestures towards an answer. “We called the Chinese ‘chancorro’…. that meant below human, like bugs or animals…. The Chinese didn’t belong to the human race. That was the way we looked at it.” “If I’d thought of them as human beings I couldn’t have done it,” he observed, “But …I thought of them as animals or below human beings.”

This is called dehumanisation. We dehumanise our fellow human beings when we convince ourselves (or allow ourselves to be convinced) that they are less than human and come to believe that, although these people appear to be human beings like us, this is merely a façade. Beneath the surface they are really subhuman creatures, fit to be hunted down and destroyed. The immense destructive power of dehumanisation lies in the fact that it excludes its victims from the universe of moral obligation, so killing them is of no greater consequence swatting a mosquito, or poisoning a rat. If dehumanisation is a key factor in war and genocide, we ought to be working very hard to prevent it.

To do this effectively, we need to understand its inner workings. You may be surprised to learn that there has been very little research into this. When I began to research the subject, around five years ago, I was shocked to discover that there is not a single scholarly book on dehumanisation in the English language and only a few dozen scientific papers. Although scholars in a wide range of disciplines acknowledge the importance of dehumanisation, and it is usually mentioned only in passing: A page here or a paragraph there. This is a dangerous omission.

If we truly care about our future, out attitude towards dehumanisation must change. Governments, non-governmental organisations and universities need to make research into dehumanisation a priority. Pronouncements like “never again” are all good and well, but unless they are backed up by policies that are underwritten by serious research, they will remain nothing more than morally uplifting sound-bites.

Unless we analyse the processes that go on in the dehumanising mind, and determine the most effective means to prevent them from occurring, the future of humanity is likely to resemble its past. Unless we are content to accept that the bloody history of 20th Century will inevitably be repeated in the 21st, we need to start taking dehumanisation seriously.