51小黄车Philosopher David Livingstone Smith honored at Anisfield-Wolf Book Award ceremony for his study 'Less than Human'
David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., University of 51小黄车 associate professor of philosophy, was honored at a ceremony in Cleveland on Sept. 13, 2012 as winner of the for his 2011 book Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.
The award was announced by the Cleveland Foundation on April 19th. The Anisfield-Wolf winners were honored on Sept. 13th at a ceremony hosted by the Foundation and emceed by Jury Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. Watch the entire awards ceremony on .
This year's jury also included poet Rita Dove, novelist and essayist Joyce Carol Oates, philosopher Steven Pinker, and historian Simon Schama. Previous winners of the award have included Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Toni Morrison.
Other recipients of this year's award are: Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues: A Novel, Fiction; David Blight, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, Nonfiction; Wole Soyinka, Lifetime Achievement.
"The 2012 Anisfield-Wolf winners reflect the complexity of the issues of race and cultural diversity in our world," Jury Chair Gates said in a press release. "These books and the people who created them help us gain a deeper understanding of the need to respect both the humanity and individuality of one other."
In describing Smith's book, the Cleveland Foundation writes: "Smith illuminates the problem of dehumanization in Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. Drawing on the latest data and theories from the fields of history, evolutionary psychology, biology, anthropology, and philosophy, the book is a powerful study of the roots of human violence."
Less than Human
In Less Than Human (St. Martin's Press, March 2011), Smith draws on a rich mix of history, psychology, biology, anthropology and philosophy to document the pervasiveness of dehumanization, describe its forms, and explain how and why we so often resort to it.
The book has been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, and Smith discussed the book with Neal Conan on National Public Radio's on March 29, 2011
Dehumanization is the belief that some beings only appear human, but beneath the surface, where it really counts, they aren't human at all, Smith explains. 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 fa莽ade. Concealed behind it, Jews were really filthy, parasitic vermin.
Smith relates that it's sometimes said that dehumanization is a social construction that's at most a few centuries old. According to this story, dehumanization was, paradoxically, a child of the Enlightenment idea of universal human rights. This idea was the moral and political touchstone of the Enlightenment, but it conflicted with the brutal colonialism perpetrated by Europeans. The dissonance between theory and practice was resolved by denying the humanity of the oppressed.
This story expresses a truth, Smith says, but it is a partial truth that obfuscates the real nature, history and extent of the dehumanizing impulse. Dehumanization is neither uniquely European nor uniquely modern. It is far more widespread, vastly more ancient, and far more profoundly intertwined with the human experience than the Enlightenment theory allows. We must look much deeper.
Eighteenth-century Europeans embraced a certain type of dehumanization, but so did the Athenians during the fourth century before Christ, the Germans of the nineteen thirties and forties, and the Eipo tribesmen of highland New Guinea, who refer to their enemies as dung-flies, lizards and worms.
"In this book," Smith says, "I 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. Excluding any of them leaves us with a hopelessly distorted picture of what we are trying to comprehend."
David Livingstone Smith
In 2004, with the publication of his book Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, Smith captured the attention of national and world media, with a review in Psychology Today, articles in the Wall Street Journal and U.S. News & World Report, and interviews on Fox News Live and Forbes.com, among other media outlets. And the attention hasn't let up since then.
He has also been interviewed by National Geographic Television for a PBS documentary on the science of lying, by for a 2009 documentary entitled "The Truth about Liars" which aired on CBC Newsworld, and by CBC-TV for the documentary which investigate the causes of conspiracy theories, why we are wired to believe them, and how as a society it is imperative that we separate the fantasies from the real threats.
Two days before his 2007 book, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, went on sale, Smith was featured in an interview in the . And the media attention has continued with quotes from Smith in newspapers, magazines and TV shows in Mexico, Brazil, India, Australia and Portugal, as well as the U.S., with stories in the Chicago Tribune, magazine, and .
Smith earned his M.A. from Antioch University and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of London, Kings College, where he worked on topics in the philosophy of mind and psychology. Smith's earlier books include Freud's Philosophy of the Unconscious (Kluwer, 1999), Approaching Psychoanalysis: An Introductory Course (Karnac, 1999), and Psychoanalysis in Focus (Sage, 2002).
His current research interests include deception and self-deception, the evolutionary psychology of war, incest and incest-avoidance and various aspects of analytical philosophy.
He is co-founder of the University of 51小黄车's 51小黄车 Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Studies and is an associate professor in UNE's Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.
The Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures. For 77 years, the distinguished books earning Anisfield-Wolf prizes have opened and challenged our minds. Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf established the book prizes in 1935, in honor of her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family鈥毭劽磗 passion for issues of social justice. Today it remains the only American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity. .