Disability as Metaphysical Threat (guest post)

 

 

Guest post

 

by

David Livingstone Smith

 

In this essay, I want to gesture towards some ideas that I have been developing concerning dehumanization-like attitudes towards disabled people. This is a complicated subject, with far reaching ramifications for moral psychology, so I cannot do much more than scratch its surface here.  To do even that I will have to explain a lot about my theoretical apparatus prior to touching on some of its implications for making sense of attitudes towards disability.

For the last ten years or so, my research has mainly been focused on the phenomenon of dehumanization, which is the topic of my 2011 book Less Than Human. Over the last several years, I’ve amended and expanded the theory of dehumanization that I set out in 2011, and I am currently working on a book entitled Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, which will set out the revised picture—the picture that I’m summarizing here—in much greater detail. 

The term dehumanization often appears in both scholarly and popular literatures, but has been endowed with a wide variety of meanings. For example, some people use dehumanization to refer to the use of certain sorts of slurs, or treat it as interchangeable with sexual objectification, or see it as the attitude of regarding others as possessing fewer distinctively human attributes than oneself, or equate it with degrading treatment. This semantic state of affairs makes it difficult to theorize dehumanization unless one is explicit about what one takes it to be.

I use the word dehumanization to refer to a certain sort of attitude. When we dehumanize others, we conceive of them as being subhuman “on the inside” despite their humanoid appearance (in more technical jargon, we attribute to them a subhuman essence). I’ve settled on this conception of dehumanization rather than any of the others because it points to a phenomenon that is at once very significant (because it plays a role in the most hideous atrocities that human beings perpetrate on one another), is inadequately captured by alternative terms, and is grossly undertheorized.

In my view, dehumanization provides a solution to a fundamental human problem: the problem of ambivalence. Homo sapiens are a hyper-social species. No other mammal comes anywhere near to the degree of sociality that we exhibit. Part of the cognitive equipment that makes this possible is a hair-trigger sensitivity to sensory cues of human-ness in others. Our minds have been shaped by evolution to quickly and reliably respond to beings with a certain sort of appearance as fellow human beings.

All social mammals must, of necessity, have strong inhibitions against acts of violence against community members, and hypersocial animals like us must have hyper-powerful inhibitions of this sort to maintain their way of life. But we Homo sapiens also possess great big brains that allow us to recognize the advantages to be gained by doing violence to others—stealing their resources, eliminating them as competitors, enslaving them, etc. 

So, on the one hand, we have strong inhibitions against harming others, and on the other, we are acutely aware of the benefits that can be accrued by harming others. We find ourselves between a rock and a hard place: we are often attracted to committing acts of collective violence, but also have a profound horror of spilling human blood.

I think that dehumanization has the function of disabling these inhibitions against harming one another. The cognitive sleight-of-hand of thinking of others as despised or feared subhuman creatures cognitively excommunicates them from what we take to be the moral community, and empowers us to engage in acts of violence that would otherwise be difficult for us to execute.

In contrast to our sensitivity to the human-ness of others, conceiving of them as less than human does not occur automatically. It is the result of instruction, by means of propaganda or entrenched ideology. This means that when one group of people dehumanizes another group of people, there is a sort of psychological tug-of-war going on inside of them. Although dehumanizers conceive of those whom they dehumanize as subhuman, it is impossible or nearly impossible for them to “turn off” recognition of these others’ humanity.

Consequently, those who dehumanize others represent them as human and subhuman simultaneously. One cognitive system (the automatic one) registers them as human, and another cognitive system (the non-automatic one) registers them as subhuman. They are not presented as partially human and partially subhuman. They are presented as all human and all subhuman.

There is a very fascinating literature, spanning several disciplines, that is pertinent to the psychological dynamics and consequences of this sort of cross-classification. I do not have the space here to describe it in its full detail, so I will have to address it in an abbreviated, but not perfunctory, way. 

In his book The Philosophy of Horror Noël Carroll asks the question “What is a monster?”[i]  By “monster,” Carroll means the sort of being found in horror fiction. Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, he suggests that monsters are threatening for two reasons. They are physically threatening because they are out to get you. They want to kill you, devour you, or suck your blood, and they are metaphysically threatening (I prefer this to Carroll’s term “cognitively threatening”) because they do not fit into the metaphysical categories that are supposed to define the natural order of things. They are bizarre, unnatural, contradictory beings: corpses that walk and eat (zombies), human beings that are also wolves (werewolves), and so on. Metaphysically threatening beings are experienced as deeply disturbing, “creepy” beings[ii]—beings that elicit an aversive reaction which, in its most extreme form, is best characterized as the feeling of horror.

As is clear from the earlier part of this discussion, dehumanized people are transformed into monsters, because even though they are imagined to be subhuman, dehumanizers are unable to override their automatic recognition of the others’ humanity. Combine this with the common belief that these others are physically threatening, and the alchemy of dehumanization transmutes them not merely into subhuman vermin, but into monstrous superpredators. Horrific monsters, then, are not confined to the dark alleys of literary and cinematic imagination; they haunt the landscape of genocidal killing fields, torture chambers, and racist propaganda.

This way of looking at things explains why dehumanizers so often assert, in word and in action, that those whom they dehumanize are nothing but animals. If there is no point in asserting to a rat that it is nothing but a rat, why should a Nazi assert to Jews (whom Nazis conceived of as akin to vermin) that they are nothing but a pack of rats?  I think that this sort of behavior, which is very common in episodes of dehumanization, is best understood as an attempt to strip dehumanized people of their threatening monstrousness—to make them into just subhuman animals instead of threatening human/subhuman chimeras.

When dehumanized people are “put in their place” in this way, this should be understood as their being put both in their social place and in their metaphysical place (of which their social place is supposed to be a reflection). But this never works for long. Like the return of the repressed, awareness of the others’ humanity keeps on reasserting itself, leading to ongoing cycles of violence and degradation.

Now, what does all of this have to do with attitudes towards disabled persons?  We can start with the notion of monstrousness. The term “monster” has deeply disturbing resonances for anyone who is acquainted with the history of attitudes to disability, because it was once commonly used to describe congenitally disabled individuals whose appearance departed from the anatomical or behavioral norms valorized by their culture. The monsters of horror fiction are malevolent beings that transgress supposedly natural boundaries between kinds, as are those human beings who are dehumanized as monsters.  Are disabled people, qua disabled people, dehumanized as monsters too?

Dehumanization, in the specific sense that I have described it, is distinct from various dehumanization-like attitudes. For example, the denigration of women (qua women) is not, in my strict sense, a form of dehumanization. Similarly, racism is not per se a form of dehumanization, although it is very often a precursor of it. However, both misogyny and racism are related to dehumanization, and can be understood, in part, using the explanatory apparatus that I have developed for explaining dehumanization.[iii]  Certain denigrating attitudes towards disabled persons are, like racism and misogyny, similar to but distinct from dehumanization.

The disabled human beings who were once characterized as “monsters” are, like fictional monsters and the monsters created by dehumanization, often perceived as transgressing the boundaries of the natural. This is not (as in the case of dehumanization) because congenitally disabled persons are believed to be outwardly human but inwardly subhuman. Rather, it is the inverse. The human status of certain disabled persons is thought to be inconsistent with their outward appearance.

Although disabled people are not generally seen as physically threatening superpredators they are nonetheless often regarded as metaphysically threatening. This is because the disabled person is both conceived of as a human being and, simultaneously, perceived as departing from the anatomical norms that are supposedly definitive of the human. So, like the dehumanized person, the disabled person is felt to be both human and non-human; an object of horrified fascination and, all too often, of persecutory violence. In departing from a culturally entrenched normative conception of the human—that is, a conception of what human beings should be like—the disabled person threatens a whole society’s conception of the natural order. [iv]

So, as is the case with dehumanized people, efforts are made to put (and keep) disabled people “in their place” through practices of exclusion, marginalization, or extermination. With regard to the latter, consider the following passage from Mary Douglas’ book Purity and Danger. [v]  The context is a discussion of the means that are employed to deal with those “anomalous” individuals who seem to transgress metaphysical boundaries (though Douglas doesn’t use the term “metaphysical boundaries”). She writes:

 

First, by settling on one or other interpretation, ambiguity is often reduced. For example, when a monstrous birth occurs, the defining lines between human and animals may be threatened. If a monstrous birth can be labeled an event of a peculiar kind, the categories can be restored.  So the Nuer treat monstrous births as baby hippopotamuses, accidentally born to humans and, with this labeling, the appropriate action is clear. They gently lay them in the river, where they belong. (Douglas 1966: 48-49)

 

Notwithstanding her shockingly casual use of the term “monstrous birth” (in 1966!), Douglas gives us a description of an act of violence, of murder, represented by the perpetrators as putting these infants in their proper metaphysical place and thus making their culturally entrenched conception of the natural safe from anything that might evidence its poverty. There is a place in the grand metaphysical scheme for human beings with a certain kind of body, and there is a place in it for hippopotami, but there is no place in for ostensibly human beings whose unusual bodies are taken to belie their humanity and who are consequently regarded as metaphysically threatening. 

Readers who are interested in exploring these issues further might like to visit my website at <https://davidlivingstonesm.wixsite.com/mysite>, where there are links to online publications of videos of my talks on dehumanization, as well as much more.

 

Notes

 

[i] Carroll, N. (1990).  The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart.  New York: Routledge.

[ii] See my article “A theory of creepiness,” at <https://aeon.co/essays/what-makes-clowns-vampires-and-severed-hands-creepy>

[iii] See my presentation “Less than human, lesser human, or defectively human,” at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1dnh0MfLng>

[iv] See my essay “The unnatural is the political” at <https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/unnatural-political>

[v] Douglas, M. (2002). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Purity and Taboo.  New York: Routledge.

 

posted by Shelley

Comments

[Elizabeth Henning]

Wonderful post. The "metaphysically threatening" insight hits the nail on the head.

[David Livingstone Smith]

Thank you!