Less than human : why we demean, enslave, and exterminate others /David Livingstone Smith.—St. Martin’s Press 2011.
非常感谢gidiok的帮助!希望我能感荷gidiok兄的美意,读完这本书,并写出一篇很久以来就想写的文章。
I wouldn’t have considered undertaking this project were it not for the rgings of my friend and colleague Anouar Majid, who insisted that I should evote my energies to investigating dehumanization at a time when I was onsidering various possible projects, and was uncertain which one to hoose. “You’ve got to do it, David!” he said to me enthusiastically over inner one evening.“Everyone talks about humanization, but hardly anyone theorizes it.” As I soon discovered, he was absolutely right.
按:人人谈论非人化,但是没有人进行理论探讨,这是一个问题。我们经常拿出一些大而化之的观点,却缺乏思考的耐心,更不要说论证。
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON,UNITED STATES DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
THESE THIRTY-FIVE WORDS ARE OFTEN QUOTED reverently. The ideal that they express—the principle that all men (that is, all human beings) have certain basic rights just because they are human—is easy to resonate with, and to applaud. But Jefferson’s words beg a vexing question: the question of who, exactly, should be counted as human.
按:天赋人权,人人都享有某些基本权利。作者却不禁反省:谁被当作这样的“人”?
I wrote this book to bring dehumanization out of the shadows, and to jump-start a conversation that is centuries overdue. To do this, I’ve drawn from a rich palette of sources—including history, psychology, philosophy, biology, and anthropology—to paint a portrait of dehumanization and the forces and mechanisms that sustain it.
Eighteenth-century Europeans embraced a certain type of dehumanization, but so did the Athenians during the fourth century before Christ, the Germans of the 1930s and ’40s, and the Eipo tribesmen of highland New Guinea, who refer to their enemies as dung flies, lizards, and worms.
In this book, I will argue that dehumanization is a joint creation of biology, culture, and the architecture of the human mind. Grasping its nature and dynamics requires that we attend to all three elements.
按:“非人化”不仅存在于18世纪的欧洲,公元前四世纪的雅典人、20世纪三四十年代的德国人(后文说:The Nazis labeled Jews as Untermenschen (“subhumans”) because they were convinced that, although Jews looked every bit as human as the average Aryan, this was a facade and that, concealed behind it, Jews were really filthy, parasitic vermin.)和新几内亚高原上的一个部落也会将他们的敌人称作肮脏的苍蝇、蜥蜴和寄生虫。
探讨“非人化”,需要从生物学、文化和心理结构这三个角度入手,缺一不可。
In this book I am concerned with the kind of ehumanization associated with war, genocide, and other forms of mass violence.
I’ve had to deliberately restrict my focus. I’ve chosen to concentrate largely (but not exclusively) on the dehumanization of Jews, sub-Saharan Africans, and Native Americans, for a couple of reasons. One is their immense historical significance. The human story is filled with pain and tragedy, but among the horrors that we have perpetrated on one another, the persecution and attempted extermination of the Jewish people, the brutal enslavement of Africans, and the destruction of Native American civilizations in many respects are unparalleled. The other reason is that they have been richly documented, which makes them excellent paradigm cases for discerning the core features of the dehumanizing process. What we learn from them can then be applied elsewhere. |