Easy Dehumanization

How can we explain our disconcerting ease in treating our fellow human beings as obstacles to eliminate rather than as beings worthy of compassion? And how, faced with this tendency, can we find a viable ethical balance between recognition of the other and preservation of ourselves?

The daily mechanisms of dehumanization

A contrast regularly strikes me in our daily behaviors: see a dog in distress on the side of the road, and many of us stop, ready to interrupt our day to help it. Social networks get inflamed over a mistreated animal, collections are organized, demonstrations mobilize. But when a human being finds themselves in the same situation of vulnerability, how many look away, quicken their pace, justify their indifference with a thousand excuses? This selective empathy reveals a flaw in our relationship to humanity. But which one, and what does it mean?

The animal, in its presumed innocence, arouses our immediate compassion. It cannot be held responsible for its situation; it is a pure victim. The human, on the other hand, is often suspect by default. We attribute intentions, responsibilities, faults to them that would justify our disengagement. “They brought it on themselves,” “it’s not my problem,” “someone else will take care of it”, so many formulas that dissolve our moral obligation into their own. Emmanuel Levinas observed in Totality and Infinity (1961) that the face of the other should call to us absolutely, remind us of our responsibility toward them. Yet we have developed a troubling capacity to “erase” this face, to make it invisible or insignificant.

Another modality of dehumanization, even more serious, infiltrates everyday language, almost imperceptibly. I regularly hear phrases like “we’re going to destroy them,” “we’re going to kill them all”, sometimes spoken without particular emotion, in contexts of sports competition, video games, or even professional conflicts. In the crowd of public transport, this negation takes a banal but revealing form: “Move over, I’m crushing you.” The other becomes a simple physical obstacle, an inert mass that hinders our progress. Martin Buber distinguished in I and Thou (1923) the “I-Thou” relationship from the “I-It” relationship. In these daily moments, we systematically transform the “Thou” into “It,” the being into thing, the person into material obstacle.

There is also the example of the car accident where the responsible party flees without providing assistance, which illustrates this dehumanizing logic. Faced with the danger represented by recognition of our responsibility, the legal, financial, social consequences, some abandon an injured person on the roadside. The instinct for self-preservation then takes precedence over the most elementary moral imperative. This behavior reflects, I believe, what Zygmunt Bauman called in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) the “social production of moral indifference”. Societies develop sophisticated mechanisms to neutralize our ethical sensitivity when it threatens our interests. Bureaucratization, division of responsibilities, physical or symbolic distance from the consequences of our acts, everything seems to contribute to facilitating this moral disconnection.

Dehumanization as a social and psychological phenomenon

The verbal violence that transforms the other into a target is not trivial. It often prepares and accompanies physical violence. Jacques Sémelin showed in his work on the logic of massacres (2005) that genocides always begin with language: we first dehumanize through words before destroying through acts. Tutsis become “cockroaches” in Rwanda, Jews become “rats” in Nazi propaganda or “the call for revocation of citizenship” for the unvaccinated during the Covid period. This animalization or reification of the other is the necessary prerequisite to their destruction. Once the other is no longer perceived as fully human, the moral barriers that normally prevent us from doing harm collapse.

Jean-Paul Sartre spoke in Being and Nothingness (1943) of “bad faith” as a refusal to assume our freedom and responsibility. Fleeing after an accident, denying our capacity for moral action to take refuge in the illusion of a survival necessity, is to lock ourselves in this bad faith. But this flight is not only individual; it is facilitated by social structures that allow us to dilute our responsibility. “I was only following orders,” “it’s not my department,” “I’m just a link in the chain,” “it’s for the good of the collective”, so many ways to absolve ourselves of our moral choices.

René Girard analyzed in his theory of the scapegoat (The Scapegoat, 1982) the process by which societies designate and sacrifice some of their members to maintain their cohesion. This dehumanization fulfills a paradoxical social function: it allows channeling collective violence onto victims previously deprived of their status as full human beings. The homeless person, the migrant, the sick person, the supposedly dangerous one, the deviant become the receptacles of our collective fears and frustrations. By dehumanizing them, we create a category of beings onto whom it becomes acceptable to project our violence, while preserving the illusion of our own humanity.

Judith Butler reminds us in Precarious Life (2004) of our fundamental vulnerability and interdependence. We are all fragile, mortal beings, dependent on each other for our physical and psychic survival. But rather than accepting this common condition, we often flee from it. We transform the one who reminds us of this vulnerability, the injured person, the homeless person, the refugee, the elderly person, into a threat to avoid rather than a neighbor to help. Butler speaks of “lives not worth mourning”, existences symbolically excluded from what truly matters to us. This hierarchization of human lives according to their supposed value is at the heart of the dehumanization process.

The ethical impasse of responsibility in the contemporary world

Faced with this ease of dehumanization, it seems necessary to me to relearn how to see. Simone Weil spoke in her Notebooks (1940-1942) of attention as a form of generosity: this capacity to suspend our judgment, our fear, our immediate interest to truly look at the one who stands before us. Not as an obstacle or threat, but as a living mystery, bearing the same dignity we claim for ourselves. Albert Camus calls us in The Rebel (1951) to be “rebellious men” against the absurd and injustice. This rebellion could begin with the refusal to participate in any form of dehumanization, however minor.

But, if we place ourselves back on the street facing a person in distress for example, this ethical requirement comes up against an inescapable reality: we cannot take care of everyone. There are dramas everywhere and constantly. In any large city, you need only walk certain streets to realize that you could spend your entire life helping those in need. The number of people sleeping on the street, families in distress, migrants in precarious situations; the scale of needs infinitely exceeds our individual capacity for action. How then do we negotiate this tension between the call of the other’s face, as Levinas describes it, and our very real human limits?

The situation becomes even more complicated in the contemporary urban context. In the Paris metro for example, people circulate daily asking for charity, some in authentic distress, others in what seems to be a calculated staging of their drama. They sometimes consciously play on our humanity and our guilt at not being able to help, creating a form of emotional manipulation. How do we distinguish sincere need from manipulation? How do we maintain our capacity for compassion without becoming naive? And conversely, how do we not fall into generalized cynicism faced with this permanent ambiguity? These practical questions reveal the complexity of maintaining an ethics of responsibility in a world where misery is both omnipresent and sometimes instrumentalized.

Between failure to assist a person in danger, which makes us legally and morally complicit in the suffering of others, and compassion fatigue that would empty us of all capacity for action, where and how do we draw our line? The law imposes on us a duty to rescue in certain situations, but morality seems to demand more. Yet, one who would stop at every distress encountered could no longer live their own life. There is a fundamental aporia here: ethics asks the impossible of us, and yet we must continue to live and act in this impossibility.

Toward a conscious and assumed ethical balance

The answer may not be found in a universal rule but in a situational ethics, attentive and reflective. It involves keeping alive our capacity to see the humanity of the other, refusing easy dehumanization, while accepting our limits with lucidity. This implies consciously choosing our commitments, giving when we truly can, and accepting without cynicism that we cannot do everything. Some choose to engage in associations, others to give regularly to chosen causes, still others to be available for emergencies they encounter. What matters is that these choices are conscious and assumed, not the fruit of indifference or dehumanization.

Alignment with oneself may not consist in resolving this tension, but in living it consciously. Recognizing that each time we pass someone in need without stopping, we make a moral choice whose weight we must bear. Not in paralyzing guilt that would prevent us from acting, but in acute awareness of our shared humanity and our necessarily limited responsibilities. This awareness can lead us to simple but significant gestures: a look that recognizes the humanity of the other even when we cannot stop, a sincere “sorry” rather than looking away, a regular contribution to causes close to our heart.

There is also a collective dimension to this question. If individually we cannot respond to all needs, collectively we have created institutions, social services, associations, solidarity systems, supposed to take care of those in need. But these systems are often failing, underfunded, overwhelmed. Our individual responsibility therefore cannot be completely delegated to institutions. It also includes a political dimension: supporting solidarity policies, voting for social programs, opposing discourses that dehumanize certain categories of population.

Dehumanization is easy because it simplifies the world, makes it manageable, protects us from guilt and moral discomfort. Maintaining the humanity of the other in our gaze, even when we cannot act, is already resisting this ease. It is accepting to live in the discomfort of this ethical tension rather than resolving it through indifference or cynicism. For it is precisely in this discomfort that our humanity lodges, fragile, imperfect, but connected to that of others. By denying the other, it is ultimately ourselves we diminish, our capacity for compassion, for solidarity, what makes us truly human beings. The challenge is not to become saints, but to remain human in social contexts that perhaps invite us too much to no longer be so.