On Inhumanity by Smith, David Livingstone;

Dehumanization and How to Resist It

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Product details:

Publisher OUP USA
Date of Publication 8 October 2020

ISBN 9780190923006
Binding Hardback
No. of pages240 pages
Size 180x132x27 mm
Weight 299 g
Language English

Short description:

Throughout the darkest moments of human history, evildoers have convinced communities to turn on groups that are regarded as in some way other and, by starting to think of them as less than human, persecute or even eliminate them. We can all recognize the unfathomable evils of dehumanization in slavery, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Jim Crow South, but we are not free from its power today. With climate change and political upheaval driving millions of refugees worldwide to leave their homes, we are likely to see more and more of this ugly and persistent phenomenon. What are we to do? Drawing on his deep and wide-ranging knowledge of the history, psychology, and politics of dehumanization, David Livingstone Smith shows us how to recognize it and how to fight back.

Long 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.

This is a book forged in urgency and written for the common reader by a philosopher seeking not just to interpret the world but to change it. His final chapter is a handbook for resistance to demagoguery.

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Why Dehumanization Matters
Chapter 3. Defining Dehumanization
Chapter 4. Holocaust
Chapter 5. Lynching
Chapter 6. How We Do Race
Chapter 7. Racism
Chapter 8. Race Science
Chapter 9. Essence
Chapter 10. From Barbados to Nazi Germany
Chapter 11. Which Lives Matter?
Chapter 12. The Act of Killing
Chapter 13. Morality
Chapter 14. Self-Engineering
Chapter 15. Ideology
Chapter 16. The Politics of the Human
Chapter 17. Dangerous Speech
Chapter 18. Illusion
Chapter 19. Genocide
Chapter 20. Contradiction
Chapter 21. Impurity
Chapter 22. Monsters
Chapter 23. Criminals
Chapter 24. Varities of Dehumanization
Chapter 25. Dehuminization and its Neighbours
Chapter 26. Resisting
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