Dehumanization
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dehumanization is a process by which members of a group of people assert the "inferiority" of another group through subtle or overt acts or statements. Dehumanization may be directed by an organization (such as a state) or may be the composite of individual sentiments and actions, as with some types of de facto racism. State-organized dehumanization has been directed against perceived racial or ethnic groups, nationalities (or "foreigners" in general), religious groups, sexes, sexual minorities, disabled people as a class, economic and social classes, and many other groups.
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[edit] Nations and governments
Sociologists and historians often view dehumanization as central to some or all types of wars. Democratic governments sometimes present "enemy" civilians or soldiers as less than human so that voters will be more likely to support a war they may otherwise consider mass murder. Dictatorships use the same process to prevent opposition by citizens. Such efforts often depend on preexisting racist, sectarian or otherwise biased beliefs, which governments play upon through various types of media, presenting "enemies" as barbaric, undeserving of rights, and a threat to the nation. Alternately, states sometimes present the enemy government or way of life as barbaric and its citizens as childlike and incapable of managing their own affairs. Such arguments have been used as a pretext for colonialism.
The Holocaust of World War II and the Rwandan Genocide have both been cited as atrocities predicated upon government-organized campaigns of dehumanization, while crimes like lynching (especially in the United States) are often thought of as the result of popular bigotry and government apathy. Anthropologists Ashley Montagu and Floyd Matson famously wrote that dehumanization might well be considered "the fifth horsemen of the apocalypse" because of the inestimable damage it has dealt to society. When people become things, the logic follows, they become dispensable - and any atrocity can be justified.
Dehumanization can be seen outside of overtly violent conflicts, as in political debates where opponents are presented as collectively stupid or inherently evil. Such "good-versus-evil" claims help end substantive debate. (See also thought-terminating cliché).
[edit] Themes of dehumanization: scapegoating, ethnic stereotypes and racism
A common theme (or meme) is that of scapegoating, where dehumanizing the target provides a release from guilt for the person that scapegoats them, who typically begins to see themselves as a victim of the dehumanized person, rather than as a potential oppressor.
Ethnic stereotypes and racism are among the most powerful tools used to dehumanize people in the eyes of others. The Nazis carried out a successful campaign of anti-Semitic propaganda to dehumanize the Jews in Germany in the 1930s, describing them as "rats" or "vermin" and arguing that they threatened the "racial purity" of Aryans. This helped justify oppression of the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust.
In war, the enemy is generally demonized, with ethnic slurs being used to dehumanize them to the point where killing them becomes morally acceptable.
[edit] Other topics
The empirically supported propaganda model of Herman and Chomsky shows how corporate media are able to carry out large-scale, successful dehumanization campaigns when that promotes the goals (profit-making) that the corporations are legally obliged to maximise. Government-controlled media, in either democracies or dictatorships, are also capable of carrying out dehumanization campaigns, to the extent with which the population is unable to counteract the dehumanizing memes.
The Darwin Awards are considered by some to be dehumanization as entertainment. The death or sterilization of Darwin Awards honorees is celebrated because they have removed their un-fit genes from the human gene pool. Others think the Darwin Awards are merely funny, without involving dehumanization. Other forms of planned circus of past eras, such as the man-to-man mortal combat gladiatorial events of the Roman Colosseum, are more clearly dehumanizing since a human life is exchanged for entertainment.
In a sense, technology can cause an illusion of dehumanization either by eroding the traditional privacy in our daily lives or by informing us of how the progress of science and rationalism tends to challenge our comforting notions of religion and humanity. The loss of privacy, especially that due to information technology, when shared by all, is not viewed as dehumanizing per se. In the extreme, posting everyone of ourselves in MRI scan, nude and accompanied by our genotype, would not dehumanize any one person, but it be viewed by some as dystopic as in the film The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. In the case of religion, for instance, the progress made by Nicolaus Copernicus (and Galileo Galilei), Hilaire Rouelle, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and James D. Watson or even Hippasus was met with negative emotions in the fashion of the Luddites because such progress via science shattered naive notions that have been concieved of based on emotions such as Narcissism and, to a lesser degree, the many implications of creationism and benevolence. Freud, in particular, gave us a better understanding that our logical conscious and our emotional unconscious were in a dynamic equilibrium with each other, thereby challenging prior notions about what makes any one person's action or decision not strictly rational and not more or less dehumanizing. In that same sense, the Internet and society itself can appear to be dehumanizing if we allow it to make us to feel like a small and replaceable component of some larger machine. If we were treat others as if they were such, then that would be dehumanizing on our part.
The dissections of human cadavers, such as in these videos was seen as dehumanizing in the Dark Ages (See History of anatomy#Medieval to early modern anatomy), but now the benefits of well-trained physicians are more clearly understood.
