Humanism Now | Secular Ethics, Curiosity and Compassionate Change

48. David Livingstone Smith on the Psychology of Dehumanization - Roots, Rhetoric, Myths and How to Resist It

• Humanise Live • Season 1 • Episode 48

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“The arc of history bends towards justice only if you keep pushing it in that direction.”

David Livingstone-Smith, Ph.D.,  award-winning author, Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England and a leading authority on dehumanization joins us to unpack how ordinary people come to see others as “less than human,” why that shift makes atrocities feel morally necessary, and what practical tools can help us resist it. 

His books include Less Than Human (Anisfield-Wolf Award), On Inhumanity (OUP), and Making Monsters (HUP; Joseph B. Gittler Award; Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize shortlist).

Connect with David Livingstone-Smith

Topics we cover

  • What dehumanization is: conceiving others as subhuman creatures or monsters
  • How we hold contradictory beliefs (human and subhuman) at the same time
  • The role of epistemic authority, leaders, “experts” and propaganda, in spreading dehumanization
  • Why racialization often precedes full dehumanization
  • Moral framing of mass violence as “self-defence” against monsters
  • Economic insecurity and social fear as fertile ground for dehumanizing narratives
  • Psychological self-defense: recognizing our manipulability
  • What actually helps: honest historical education, dismantling racial thinking, and a robust press

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Music: Blossom by Light Prism

James Hodgson:

Welcome to the Humanism Now podcast, a space for exploring secular ethics, compassion and curiosity. I'm your host, james Hodgson, here on Humanism Now. We often talk about the value of humanizing others, seeing each person's dignity, worth and shared humanity, but what about the other side of that coin? What happens when people are stripped of that recognition? What is dehumanisation? When should we be concerned and how should we best resist it? Our guest today is one of the world's foremost thinkers and writers on the subject, professor David Livingstone-Smith.

James Hodgson:

David is a professor of philosophy at the University of New England whose work for the past two decades has focused on the psychology and philosophy of dehumanization, particularly in relation to race and genocide. He's the author of three highly acclaimed and award-winning books on the topic Less Than Human why we Demean, enslave and Exterminate Others, on Inhumanity, Dehumanization and how to Resist it, and Making Monsters the Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, and he also writes at the Substack Dehumanization Matters. David's work has been featured widely in international media, in television documentaries and at major events, including speaking at the G20 Economic Summit on Dehumanization and Mass Violence. I'm delighted that Professor Livingstone-Smith joins us today to explore what dehumanization really means, why it matters and how understanding it can help us build a more compassionate, humanistic world. Professor David Livingstone-Smith, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now.

James Hodgson:

Thank you for inviting me, so I wonder if we could start with defining our terms. In your research, what have you found to be the best way to think of dehumanization?

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

That's a great question, to start with, because the word is used in many different ways. It's acquired many different meanings since it was introduced into the English language in the early 19th century.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Even in the academic literature it's used in many different ways and often incompatible ways. What I mean by dehumanization is the following To dehumanize others is to conceive of them as less than human creatures. So if I say conceive, I mean it happens in your head. It's a psychological phenomenon, although it's not intelligible. If we only focus on psychology, we have to look at the social and political forces that impact human psychology. And second I use the term creature. And second I use the term creature. I didn't say animal, I said creature. And that's because typically when people are dehumanized, they are thought of not merely as vermin, for instance, or as bloodthirsty predators, but as monstrous beings. So that's my take on dehumanization, and it's not that any other views are wrong. It's just there are a variety of views. So it's really important to be explicit about what one means at the outset, absolutely yes, and I think that's a really helpful definition.

James Hodgson:

But I note that you also, in a couple of your books, note that actually you found the level of research to be quite sparse on dehumanization. Obviously, you've taken this on in the last two decades. Why do you feel that this field has been underexplored, and have you seen an improvement in, or more research now following your work in this area?

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

research now following your work in this area? Yeah, in the past. So if you go researching dehumanization, almost all the publications you're going to find are by social psychologists. It's only pretty recently and I'd like to take a little bit of credit for this since my first book on the topic in 2011, that research into dehumanization in fields outside of social psychology has become more fulsome. Now why? That's a really hard question to answer.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

There is a tendency in the academic world to not tread on other people's turf. I mean, it's a ridiculous tendency. I don't think that accounts for it. I think maybe it's because dehumanization is very strange and a lot of people don't think it's even credible to claim that it exists. When I say really strange, a lot of people have difficulty believing that members of our species can really think of other members of our species as subhuman creatures. Think of other members of our species as subhuman creatures. And so if that's the case, then what is ostensibly dehumanization? What is ostensibly doing just that, must boil down to simply using degrading language without actually believing, and that happens a lot, right, someone calls someone else a pig or a bitch or a rat or something.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

They don't mean to say they believe that they're subhumans. They're just using words as weapons. But dehumanization, as I and some others see it, is not like that. That's not dehumanization, that's just bad-mouthing people. Dehumanization involves this belief that these others are not really members of our kind at all.

James Hodgson:

Yes, that makes a lot of sense and I think your books are engrossing but challenging in that respect I mean, for for one part, we're dealing with some of the worst atrocities in recorded history, but also that point you mentioned of it's very difficult to really understand the contradiction and the cognitive dissonance that's going on in the way in which people perceive others.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Yeah, if I can add something there, there is a tendency for many people who theorize human behavior to think of the mind as non-contradictory.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

The idea then is well, obviously these people and this I totally agree with, by the way, people who dehumanize others, also characterize them, implicitly or explicitly, as human beings. You can think of any genocide, you know, during the Holocaust and before. Jewish people were considered by Nazis as subhumans. Fine, but they were also regarded as criminals, and you have to be a human being to be a criminal. Right, rats and lice can't be criminals, and this is absolutely typical of dehumanizing discourse. So there's a tendency of some people think if you see them as human, you can't see them as subhuman. Now, that's fine. Logically speaking, that's true, but psychologically thinking, it's absolutely false. We human beings are capable of sustaining contradictory beliefs all the time, and all of us do, and so if we recognize that, then this objection to the very notion of dehumanization, which is an old objection it's very popular now, but it goes back at least to the late 17th century it just doesn't have any traction.

James Hodgson:

Yes, and even if we recognize the complexity in ourselves, there's a tendency to view others in a very linear thought pattern. Yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned that obviously most people think dehumanization is a form of language and that it's more complex than that. But what role does language play in dehumanization? Are there certain kinds of language that we should be alert to when sort of spotting the signs?

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Yeah, certainly so. Language plays a number of different roles, of different roles. We can't really diagnose the presence of dehumanization very readily anyway by concentrating on anything other than language. So I guess, as a side point, a lot of people get me wrong on this. The following point I want to make a lot of people think I say that atrocity requires dehumanization. It absolutely does not.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Dehumanization merely helps people to perpetrate atrocities, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient. So we can't just look at behavior. We have to look at communications that people make, mostly verbally but occasionally through, say, graphic art, which was popular in the Middle Ages when most people couldn't read and so dehumanizing ideas were difficult to circulate outside of pictorial representations. Dehumanization gee, how do I want to answer this? I'm going to come in through the back door here. So dehumanization isn't something, in my view, that spontaneously arises in the human mind. People don't sit around and think, oh, those others, they're different, they must not be human, we can do horrible things to them. Not at all. We have a very highly developed capacity to recognize others as human beings, as fellow human beings. The side of the human face is actually very important in that respect. As you look at me and I look at you, I submit that neither of us can do anything other than respond to one another as human beings. It's just how we're built, as highly social animals. So we need other people to get us to humanize others, and these are people who we place in a position of cognitive authority or, as I like to put it, epistemic authority, people who are supposed to know, people who are in the role of expert. Now, these people don't always merit that status, but what matters is the status, and here's why. So look, I look at you and you look at me, and we see human, and we don't have any problems with that. This is what our senses tell us Immediately, bang, unstoppably, and we go about the world making judgments like that all the time. I see the trees out of my back window and wow, those are trees and nothing but trees.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

But there are many cases in human life where we defer to the experts. If I think the ring I'm wearing is platinum and I take it to a metallurgist and they tell me, no, it's actually silver, I defer. Why do I defer? Because I grant them the role of the expert and they merit it. But unfortunately, this attitude of deference, which is absolutely necessary for human society also makes vulnerable. It requires a measure of trust, and because it requires us to trust I'm not in a position to dispute that my ring isn't plasma Because of that we can be told and we're inclined to accept, and in fact it's rational to accept, that other members of our species are not really human beings.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

You know, if the expert is Dr Goebbels, hitler's propaganda minister, who many Germans thought was an expert, someone who was supposed to know, or one of the many so-called race scientists that flourished in the 19th and the first part of the 20th century, and some of these people didn't deserve the designation of race expert, right, but many people who have made such pronouncements did. They were the cream of the intellectual crop who informed people. Well, you know, people of African descent might look human but they're not really human. Jewish people might look human but they're not really human, and so on, just like our dealings with the expert on precious metals, most of us poor schmucks defer. And so it's through language, then, that such people, whether they're cynically manipulative, like some political figures and religious figures, or whether they actually believe what they say, get us then, through the medium, almost entirely, of speech, to think of others as less than human. That was rather long-winded, but there are a lot of bells and whistles.

James Hodgson:

So can we take from that, then, that this is learned? This is something that comes from nurture rather than nature.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Yeah, although I dispute the very division of things into nature and nurture. But I get your point and yes, it's something that's acquired. People need to induce us to dehumanize others. Now they take advantage of certain psychological dispositions. We have to manipulate us to think of others as subhuman, and that's in the interest of enabling us and motivating us to do terrible things to other human beings, often to the advantage of the propagandist, of course. They use our psychological dispositions to get us to think of these others as subhuman.

James Hodgson:

And so, through your research, have you come to conclusions, to whether you think all people are potentially susceptible to being convinced by a charismatic leader.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

I am very cautious about the word all when we're dealing with sphere of biology, the animal behavior, the behavior of these animals that we are all rarely applies because, as Darwin taught us, variation is the norm in nature. It's not an exception at all. But those qualifications aside, speaking much more loosely, yeah.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

I think, under the right circumstances, we're all potential dehumanizers, just as we're all potential targets of dehumanization. That's a crucial question, by the way, because the tendency is to dehumanize the outstanding examples of dehumanization, to say, for instance, that Hitler was a monster. Well, hitler was a human being. Monsters don't exist and, just by the way, I'm ethnically Jewish, so I can say this with impunity Hitler was a human being and you see, when we think of these people as monsters, we're doing exactly the wrong thing, because what we should be doing is looking in the mirror that they hold up to us, about showing us what human beings are capable of.

James Hodgson:

And, yes, the point that there seems to be these repeated analogies that are used and almost they come time and time again throughout history in your books, that of the animal and, using animalistic language, that of the monster and that of the criminal, that they are a direct threat. And do you see this as obviously that might be a connection, you know, pre-darwin, and understanding of our place within the animal kingdom, a kind of acknowledgement that we are clearly similar to animals, but we also feel and can obviously see that we are different and we are distinct from other animals in certain ways, and so there is something going on there in the psychology of how we see ourselves and how we see others.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Yeah, so before the 16th century, animal was a much more inclusive term than it later became. It included us. So Aristotle said man is a political animal. There was nothing weird about that, right, he wasn't saying that we are subhuman. He's including us in the world of animal life. We're special animals in his view, and of course, with Darwin, we now understand that all animals are special in their own ways. So at some point in history and I have speculative views about this, because when we're thinking about human behavior in the very distant past, it's virtually all speculation, the data just isn't there At some point, and I suggest it's when human beings adopted a sedentary way of life, we developed a picture of the universe, and in particular the world of living things, which is hierarchical, and that is there are higher and lower kinds of entities.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

With the advent of monotheism, god was placed at the top of this hierarchy. So it's a hierarchy of perfection. God is supposed to be perfectly perfect, and then, in medieval European versions, you have the God, then the archangels, then the angels, and then we human beings modestly place ourselves just below the angels, and then we human beings modestly place ourselves just below the angels and various other forms of life, down to inert matter. This is typically called by historians of ideas the great chain of being. Now, the idea here with the great chain of being is that there are degrees of resemblance to God, and Homo sapiens the term we now use, they didn't use back then are the closest animal to God right. Everything below it, everything ranked below the human, therefore, is by definition subhuman right. The very idea of subhumanity is a hierarchical conception. Now, I said that his looked at if I didn't say this explicitly, I certainly implied it and I'll say it explicitly it and I'll say it explicitly.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Historian of ideas tend to think of this as a distinctively European notion which developed in late antiquity, cobbled together out of Greek philosophical ideas, that it enjoyed a career until the late 18th century and early 19th century, with the rise of biological science, and that it then died out. Well, that's not right. This hierarchical conception is considerably older than the work of Plato and Aristotle. We find it, for instance, in the book of Genesis, in the Torah, and it's also much more widely distributed. We find it on every continent on earth and, finally, it hasn't disappeared.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

If there was a fly buzzing around in the studio where you are and you were to swat it and I were to say to you, how could you take the life of that being? What's your response going to be? Well, it's just a fly. It ranks very low in the hierarchy. So this way of thinking is still very, very much with us, and I think it's very much with us because it's virtually unavoidable. And it's virtually unavoidable because we require some justification for killing other living things and exploiting them, and so you know, it's a really important idea, but it gets us into trouble. I can't even remember the beginning of that discourse, oh yes, about similarity and difference with other animals. So we like to set ourselves apart, and when we set ourselves apart as occupying this special rank in the hierarchy, we distance ourselves from other organisms, and that permits us to treat other organisms in ways which we otherwise would find very difficult. And so, therefore, when we come to regard others as subhuman, as lower than the human on the hierarchy, this licenses all sorts of terrible acts.

James Hodgson:

Thank you, and you mentioned that justification which I guess is the difficult part again for us to comprehend. And again, even if there may be some people who use dehumanizing language or they have potentially dehumanizing thoughts when it moves to greater forms, acts of violence and worse, the hard thing to comprehend is how do people feel justified in committing those acts? And I wondered if you could pull out some of the key psychological ways in which people justify committing these. And I was particularly interested in the book with the link with morality and ideology, which generally we consider to be positive terms. But you draw a bit of a connection there.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Yeah, there's so much I could say in response to that. Let's start with the last part of what you said. Yes, let's start with the last part of what you said. Yes, if we look at mass atrocities and I hesitate to use the word genocide only because genocide is, strictly speaking, a legal concept it tends to cast more heat than light. When we're talking about mass atrocities, the vernacular notion of genocide is rather different from the legal notion of genocide. So mass atrocities, exterminations, oppression, enslavement and so on, actually let's stay with mass killing, the most egregious, horrific mass atrocity.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Such acts are typically highly moralistic Not everyone, but people who both inspire and perform those acts very typically see themselves as saving the world from evil. The Holocaust was like that, the horrors of European colonization were like that, the Rwanda genocide was like that. So these are highly moralistic actions. Perpetrators very often turn to moral considerations to justify what they do. Now you think how can that be? Think of it this way. First of all, in the very worst forms of dehumanization, which really characterize many, in fact I would say to some degree probably all such activities, the dehumanized other is not seen nearly as a subhuman creature, or rather a subhuman animal, as a monstrous creature. Now, when you're fighting monsters as embodiments of evil, of course it's not only morally permissible, it's morally obligatory to destroy or constrain them, right. So it's not so mysterious. If we look at the mindset of people, it's not so mysterious that they understand what they're doing as in the service of the good. Now, how do they come to that understanding? They come to that understanding. Come to that understanding like. Come to that understanding as I intimated earlier, by let's use this term very broadly propaganda. Right, there are people become convinced by others that this is the situation and therefore we must destroy these monsters as an act of self-defense, destroy these monsters as an act of self-defense, right Again, that's another feature of it. Mass atrocities are typically represented as self-defense, the self-defense against the monsters, the demons.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Now, to convince us propagandists, let's look at political propaganda. Propagandists, let's look at political propaganda. There's a distinctive pattern in the discourse of really effective, really dangerous political propaganda. I've just written a paper on this, on Hitler and Donald Trump actually, who, although different in many respects, are very similar in their propagandistic style.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

And, very broadly, the propagandist must first get his audience. I say his because people in this position are typically, although not exclusively, male to feel vulnerable, to feel helpless. After getting them to feel vulnerable to feel helpless. After getting them to feel vulnerable and helpless by inducing, say, a sense of futility and depression and then a kind of paranoia that their terrible circumstances are due to some other group of people the Jews, the communists, whatever then they offer this magical solution, what the psychoanalyst Roger Monicar called the manic solution join us, we'll march ahead and destroy them and make the world safe for humanity, and so on and so forth. That's really powerful and really simple, and all those people which we might some people would say excessively loosely I don't think it's very loose those people who we might call fascist leaders or fascist propagandists, regularly employ this and it works.

James Hodgson:

Unfortunately, yeah, and it's incredibly revealing reading your books. I know it's known over the course of the last 10 to 15 years, but how prevalent that language is currently and how much we hear it now.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Incidentally, the analysis I just gave you and this is particularly pertinent, I think, to your podcast comes from Freud's view on the psychology of religion. And you might say, well, that's weird. Well, it's not weird if you look at the attitude of what I call true believers to these leaders that I call sacred leaders. They're regarded as omnipotent, omniscient and not quite omnipresent, but certainly omnibenevolent. They are, in effect, seen as God's representative on earth. And Freud said look, in straightforward theism, where these beliefs come from is this profound sense of helplessness which is intrinsic to the human condition, and the very understandable yearning for salvation, even though that salvation is mythical. And that's what these leaders promise us Salvation, salvation from the terrors.

James Hodgson:

Yeah, so true. And so you mentioned some of the core foundations, I guess, for where atrocities may occur in the rhetoric, in the attitudes of the leaders, this use of, again, very evocative language, using terms that you would typically use to describe animals or monsters, to describe the other. But in your research, were there any other societal conditions or particular triggers that you found which would then take where there was that danger of going from just obviously the rhetoric, which is dangerous enough in itself, to the real atrocities?

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Yes, and this brings us back to your last question, which was so pointed. There's so many complexities involved. I had to pick and choose, so a couple of things I'll highlight here. One is that very typically not exclusively, but very typically in many of the most egregious examples of mass drossy that come to mind, groups of people are racialized before they're dehumanized. What does that mean? Full transparency? I do not believe in race. I think it's an invention that was concocted to legitimate oppression and abuse, and you know it's not common knowledge, but there's a virtual consensus among people who actually study this stuff. The notion of race is not biologically justified at all. So anyway, that's an important point to make, because it's something I go with aspects of my work.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

But people are definitely racialized. They're categorized as belonging to separate races. So there's the us, our kind and their kind, and racialization. If we look historically at it, it has very clear function it legitimates harming people. Now, when groups of people are racialized, that's not the same as dehumanizing them. Racialization keeps people in the category of the human. It just demotes them within that category. This was very explicit, say, in 18th century versions of the great chain of being that I talked about. Europeans placed themselves at the pinnacle of humanity, and sub-Saharan Africans or Native Americans or Laplanders, who were a big target of racism back then, were relegated to the bottom, gated to the bottom. Now, typically, when people are racialized, they are regarded as intrinsically criminal. If you think of the genocidal mass atrocities, the target group is accused of being criminal. They're murderers, they're rapists, just as Donald Trump said of undocumented immigrants from Latin America. Okay, already they're seen as physically threatening. Right, they need to be constrained or eliminated or excluded or whatever, incarcerated, enslaved, anything to handle inferior, dangerous human beings.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Dehumanization typically happens when a racialized group is demoted further to the subhuman level, and the patterns involved the cognitive patterns in racialization are incredibly similar to the cognitive patterns in dehumanization. What is that? They are fundamentally and essentially an important term different. If they're essentially different, this is unmodifiable. It's just in their very nature they're different and inferior, and that status is ultimately a biological status that is handed down from parents to offspring. Just as the idea is, if your parents are a certain race, you belong to that race. If your parents are subhumans, you are a subhuman. So societies, then, that operate with these racial categories are primed for dehumanization, and I really do think if we could get rid of the notion of race, that would go a long way towards preventing dehumanization. Unfortunately, maybe 500 years from now if we survive that long, that might happen.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

So that's one bit. The other bit is, you'll remember, when I was talking about propaganda, I said people must be made to feel helpless, and then they become suckers for these messages of salvation that fascist leaders specialize in giving. If people are objectively vulnerable and helpless in a society, that's fertile ground for this kind of propaganda. So if people don't have enough to eat, if they don't have jobs, if they don't have healthcare, it's objectively rough amongst a large sector of the population, in contrast to the way life is for the elites.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Right, because how do you know things are rough for you. Well, there are people that it's not rough for right. It's a comparative situation. That understandable and rational sense of helplessness then can be exploited. Yes, further, there's fertile ground for inducing in people this, what I call excess helplessness, or beliefs in excess helplessness, and then delivering the message if we can only get rid of these communists or these jews or whatever, then life would be just great for y'all that's so fascinating and and there's so many elements of what you were saying that which seems more relevant today and pressing.

James Hodgson:

All of those criteria seem to be very present, certainly, which paints quite a scary picture for where we are currently. But what have you found in your research has been the most effective interventions for countering dehumanization?

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

That's really hard because Dehumanization tends not to be effectively countered. Fear is a tremendously powerful motivator, and those who get us to dehumanize others typically invoke the currency of fear. So very often the dehumanizers have the best stories, the stories that move human beings to action. Now I have in my head a whole program here. It's not a program that exemplifies very much in reality. One reason is because people don't really take the study of dehumanization seriously. It's a fringe area of study and I think it should be absolutely central. Someone should be paying me a lot of money to direct an institute on dehumanization.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

I'm myself self-interested but nonetheless also other-interested. So what? Proper education? Not just education per se. I mean the Nazi SS, generally speaking highly educated. Almost half of the Nazis sitting around the table at the Wannsee conference where the program of extermination was put on the table, almost half of them had PhDs. They weren't a stupid and uneducated bunch.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

So when I say proper education, proper historical education, truthful historical education, and the reason why that is, I think, really important is because virtually every human group has blood on its hands. Nations are typically born in violence and it's very important for all of us to become acquainted with our dirty laundry. And that's very important because if we become acquainted with that, then it becomes real that we are capable of doing these things. We have done them. Maybe we're doing them now and we don't even recognize it. So it induces a kind of sense of moral humility which then can motivate. Well, we need to take seriously what we're capable of and what people then can induce us to do so. Proper historical education.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

I've already mentioned undermining the notion of race. Very unfortunately, I think, many people whose hearts are in the right place, who want to combat racism, also further entrench the very notion of race which, in my view, has racism built right into it as a hierarchical notion, well-supported press capable of calling out with impunity those who wish to get us to think of others as less than human. None of these things are bulletproof. They can all be subverted, but I think collectively and there's one more thing to add they help protect us from dehumanization. Of course, when things get rough, a lot of this stuff goes out the window.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

That's just how it is. A certain kind of education in human psychology too is really important. People need to understand that they're capable of doing these things. They need to know about those psychological dispositions which allow them to be manipulated. This is not what you get in Psychology 101 in the first year of university. This is psychological self-defense, as it were.

James Hodgson:

But all of those, like I said, they can all be subverted, and there is no coherent program anywhere in the world as far as I can see of implementing these things, and so it sounds like, even with the right program and the right education and also the individual responsibility of doing the work to resist these forces, it's an ongoing. If this isn't something we're going to overcome one day and say we've rid the world of dehumanization, this has to be a continued endeavor to resist the forces.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

The arc of history bends towards justice only if you keep pushing it in that direction. On its own, it tends to spring back in the other direction, and at many places in the world I would include the United Kingdom Now, where I used to live for a couple of decades we're teetering on the edge. Certainly in the United States that's the case. As you're aware, there is a collective lurch towards right-wing authoritarianism in many places in the world right now.

James Hodgson:

Unfortunately so, and obviously here at Humanism Now we're advocates for the virtues of secular humanism as a way to approach the world and to think of others. We're interested to get your views on humanism and whether you see if humanism can be part of that pool of tools to resist dehumanization, part of that countering.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Yeah, people mean a lot of different things by the word humanism. I describe myself as a humanist, I think, to the extent that humanism is helpful to us, and it's not necessarily always helpful. You know, there were plenty of Nazis who were, under some descriptions, humanists, who were, under some descriptions, humanists. Although religion of various sorts, most particularly Christianity, did play a big role in National Socialism, I think that the chief virtue is a kind of defiance of unjustified cognitive authority, right? So what I take as intrinsic to humanism is celebrating and promoting critical thought rather than deference and deference unjustified intellectual deference is a key element in the propagation of dehumanizing ideas. Now I'd also like to say a respect for what I'm struggling for words here.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Let's put it this way what science tells us? Our best scientific pictures of the world which do not justify the notion of hierarchy? Right? Ever since Darwin, we've known that the world is structured as a hierarchy. It's certainly helpful because it not only encourages us to think critically, which when people say critical thinking, I usually say isn't that just thinking? Isn't thinking by its nature critical? In that sense? It teaches us to think rather than simply accept. And what's true of science and the respect for science is also true of other forms of disciplined inquiry, such as historiography and so on. All of that stuff is important and it's important to promote it, and it's important to educate people in these areas as a way of attempting to constrain dehumanization. Again, not bulletproof, but hey, we're looking for the best we can do, not magical solution.

James Hodgson:

And looking ahead. Given the persistence of dehumanization across history and, as mentioned, the language and the actions are prevalent right to the current day in society. What gives you hope, looking to the future, that we might resist?

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

I differentiate hope from optimism, and here I've adopted a phrase from Cornel West I'm hopeful, but I'm not optimistic. Or, as Gramsci, the Marxist theorist, the Italian Marxist theorist, talked about what is it? The pessimism of reason, the optimism of will, which captures it as well. I think we've got some very tough times ahead, and climate change is going to play a real big role in that, and I simply don't think human beings are remotely prepared for the social and political consequences of climate change. I mean, we already have refugee crises that are unprecedented and that will become much more extreme. Wealthy nations are going to close their doors. It's really. Places in the world become unlivable. There'll be massive movements of populations and breakdowns of infrastructures and so on. That's a perfect storm for dehumanization, and I just don't think that we humans are taking this anywhere near seriously enough. The scientists are, politicians are not, and the business people are not. Where the big money is. They're not taking it seriously enough. So I'm very pessimistic about the future of dehumanization worldwide, but I'm hopeful.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

What do I mean by that? First of all, I might be totally wrong. That would be great. I'm a weird scholar who wants to be wrong because of the nature of the things that I study. And in any case, we need to give our best shot. Those of us who are concerned about these things, and it's only we have to be hopeful to do that. We have to have the idea that we can at least mitigate outcomes. At least in principle it's possible to mitigate these things. That's my view.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Let's get together, let's work towards making human societies more humane, helping people to feel more secure in their lives, and we've done something to the extent that we can do that.

James Hodgson:

And what are you working on next?

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Okay, All right. Well, that's a little bit in the air. I have just finished this paper that I mentioned to you on the strange phenomenon of fascist leaders being quasi-religious figures, and I use the examples of Hitler and Trump and bring in Freud's psychology of religion and so on. Psychologists hate me talking about Freud because he's really pursuing an en grata in this current psychological world. But hey, freud's always looking over my shoulder. I'm a big Freud fan, my wife and I.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

My wife is a philosopher from Jamaica and we wanted to write a book on race, about getting rid of race, but unfortunately publishers have been scared off. Our agent thinks, and we think that it's scared of blowback, that it's not regarded as we're easily I don't know why this happens seen as advocating racist views by saying not only that race is a fantasy, but it's a destructive fantasy. Look at the track record of race. The atrocities there's just unquestionable. That race has done much more harm than good. But our agent says look, I still think we can get this published. So we're still continually revising the book proposal. As she said, the world has changed in the last few years so that might be the next thing, but I've also put in a book proposal.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

There's at least one publisher that's interested in this on the psychological dimensions of fascism, like what is it about? The part of the proposed title is the Allure of Fascism. What is it about us that makes us receptive to these awful things? And fascism scholars tend to not address this. They'll look at all sorts of other important things like economics and geopolitics and so on. Those are really important for understanding the uptake of fascism, but what goes on in people's heads is very, very important, and that's what I want to write a book on, and I'm sure you notice that my books are written as books that are of interest to academics but are accessible to virtually anyone. These things are just too important to have 12 philosophers sit down and split hairs over, and these latter two books will be of that character.

James Hodgson:

Yeah, I can speak from experience that your books do get across very complex and challenging and often contradictory ideas, as you say, in the psychology of what's going on, in a very accessible form. So thank you very much for your continued work. I'm delighted to hear that. Thank you, and before we go off our standard closing question what's something which you've changed your mind on recently?

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Okay. So my first book on dehumanization came out in 2011. I was just trying to figure things out. About 10 years later, I realized I'd gotten some things wrong. So in that book, I said that when we dehumanize others, we think of them as literally as subhuman animals rather than human beings. But I realized that there are some very good objections to that, some of which colleagues have raised, and I thought I've got to rethink this. And so in my latter two books on dehumanization on inhumanity, in 2020 and on making monsters in 2021, I took quite a different line and said that when we dehumanize others, we actually turn them into monsters, not merely so-called less-than-human animals, but monstrous beings. That was a big change. I've changed my mind about things a lot in my life. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett once wrote the late Daniel Dennett I've made many mistakes in my life and I hope to make many more, because that's how we learn right.

James Hodgson:

Professor David Livingstone-Smith, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now.

Prof. David Livingstone Smith:

Thank you, James. This was a terrific conversation.

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