96/100 On Inhumanity
Revisiting a Memorable Book
In this long process of learning and relearning myself and the world, one of the ideas that continues to return to me is the simple notion of “it could happen here, too.”
Specifically, I think of this final moment in David Livingstone Smith’s book, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It. Books likes this deserve special attention, in my opinion, for two reasons:
- It is difficult to write of terrible things so clearly that one could learn from it
- It is a proper and needed task for philosophy to engage with directly
The entire book is worth the quick read, but I think of this moment from the final chapter:
“But to resist dehumanization you’ve also got to oppose the dehumanizing impulse in yourself. To do this, you need to understand that you are capable of dehumanizing others” (185).
In this book, it is hard to pull a quote because, as it is with philosophy, the argument is weaved throughout the whole process, but I want to offer this as a quite note:
I identify this as perhaps the most essential idea one could hold, one of the most essential questions one could ask of themselves: “how am I a part of the problem?”
More soon,
Trevor