Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others
2012; The MIT Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-4148
Autores Tópico(s)Biotechnology and Related Fields
ResumoLESS THAN HUMAN: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith, St. Martin's Press, New York, 2011, 326 pages, $16.49. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If you harbor any doubts about man's capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man, you will lose them when reading this disturbing, important book. In Less Than Human, David Livingstone Smith unblinkingly describes the darker side of mankind's history. He focuses on horrors perpetrated upon sub-Saharan Africans, and Native Americans due to their immense historical significance and because they are richly documented. But the awful tales he relates come from across the world and some date back to prehistory. There are stories of mass murder, rape, slavery, and torture. But most poignant are the stories of individual victims. There is, for example, the heart-rending tale of Ota Benga, a Batwa (pygmy) tribesman whose family was killed in the Congo Free State by the mercenary forces of King Leopold II of Belgium, who was sold into slavery and purchased by an American entrepreneur, who was put on display in 1904 in the Bronx Zoo (where he shared a cage with an orangutan), and who, freed but longing to return home, killed himself with a bullet to his own heart. What makes it possible for us homo sapiens to treat other members of our species so horrifically, Smith argues, is our unique mental ability to essentialize the world around us. We divide living things into species, and species into kinds. We then rank species and kinds from highest to lowest. There are very good evolutionary reasons we are built to view living beings this way. Considering animals and insects as inferior things enabled our ancestors to thoroughly exploit these creatures, while seeing other groups of homo sapiens as either human or inhuman gave our forebears a potent psychological prop for choosing either trade or war as a means to acquire resources. Smith convincingly argues that, since all homo sapiens have the capacity to dehumanize other homo sapiens, each of us also possesses the potential to commit atrocities--and even to take pleasure from such acts. We should not think of, say, German troops and New World settlers as monsters for what they did to Jews, Native Americans, or African slaves. Instead, what we should find troubling is just how ordinary many of them were. As distressing as this idea may be for some, for U.S. service members, the most disturbing facet of this book will be reading the words of fellow service members and realizing just how neatly these words fit into humanity's dark tradition of dehumanization. There is the Gulf War pilot who, in language reminiscent of that used by the Hutus during the Rwandan genocide, said, It's almost like you flipped on the light in the kitchen at night and the cockroaches start scurrying, and we're killing them. …
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