On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It
- ISBN-10
- 0190923024
- ISBN-13
- 9780190923020
- Category
- Philosophy
- Pages
- 192
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-05-25
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Author
- David Livingstone Smith
Description
The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again--that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche--deeper than prejudice itself--leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. An award-winning author and philosopher, Smith takes an unflinching look at the mechanisms of the mind that encourage us to see someone as less than human. There is something peculiar and horrifying in human psychology that makes us vulnerable to thinking of whole groups of people as subhuman creatures. When governments or other groups stand to gain by exploiting this innate propensity, and know just how to manipulate words and images to trigger it, there is no limit to the violence and hatred that can result. Drawing on numerous historical and contemporary cases and recent psychological research, On Inhumanity is the first accessible guide to the phenomenon of dehumanization. Smith walks readers through the psychology of dehumanization, revealing its underlying role in both notorious and lesser-known episodes of violence from history and current events. In particular, he considers the uncomfortable kinship between racism and dehumanization, where beliefs involving race are so often precursors to dehumanization and the horrors that flow from it. On Inhumanity is bracing and vital reading in a world lurching towards authoritarian political regimes, resurgent white nationalism, refugee crises that breed nativist hostility, and fast-spreading racist rhetoric. The book will open your eyes to the pervasive dangers of dehumanization and the prejudices that can too easily take root within us, and resist them before they spread into the wider world.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2020-05-25
- 192 pages
- Ebook
- Oxford University Press
-
- 2020
- 241 pages
- Paperback
- Oxford University Press, USA
Similar books
-
On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and how to Resist it
By David Livingstone SmithThe Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred.
-
Woman's Inhumanity to Woman
By Phyllis CheslerThis fascinating work concludes by showing that women depend upon one another for emotional intimacy and bonding, and exclusionary and sexist behavior enforces female conformity and discourages independence and psychological growth.
-
Man's Inhumanity To Man
By Kurt WallachMan's Inhumanity to Man details and describes the Holocaust's systematic torturing and murdering of more than 13 million human beings at 37 concentration camps by the Nazi's and their surrogates.
-
Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag
By Golfo AlexopoulosThe first study to examine the Gulag penal system through the lens of health, medicine, and human exploitation, this extraordinary work draws from previously inaccessible archives to offer a chilling new view of one of the pillars of ...
-
Inhumanity: Issues 1-2
By Matt Kindt, Brian Michael Bendis, Matt FractionInhumanity: Issues 1-2
-
Summary of David Livingstone Smith's On Inhumanity
By , Everest MediaEverest Media,. Insights on David Livingstone Smith's On Inhumanity Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights Front Cover.
-
A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944
By Willy Peter ReeseA Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War, Russia 1941-44 is the haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia ...
-
Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization
By David Livingstone SmithPassing Strange In her book Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, art historian Debra Higgs Strickland looks at how medieval European Christians represented those whom they feared or despised as monsters: Jews, ...
-
Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others
By David Livingstone SmithR. Wrangham and D. Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence (New York: Matiner, 1997), 219. 6. Ibid., 70. 7. J. Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
-
Labor Avoidance: The Origins of Inhumanity
By Jon HuerLabor Avoidance explores American capitalism, the only social system that openly avoids labor, and how it has become responsible for so much human struggle and misery throughout history.