“Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you,” he continued. “There is more than one would think.” He spoke with gravity and moral conviction, his eyes boring into the interviewer, who was off-camera. “There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see, but there is some,” he said.
Then, as I was scrolling, I came upon a short video of an interview that the author James Baldwin gave many decades ago. Dehumanization is any way of seeing and acting that covers the human face, that refuses to recognize and respect the full dignity of each person. All this amounts to the steady evisceration of the moral norms that can make our planet a decent place to live-and their gradual substitution with distrust, aggression, and rage. The causes of this rising culture of dehumanization are almost too many to count: tribalism, racism, ideological dogmatism, social media. The famous dates of our century point to this great unfolding of barbarism-SeptemJanuOctober 7, 2023.
These are all products of the rising tide of dehumanization that has swept across the world. Footage of mobs physically assaulting some lone stranger they disagree with, pummeling him as he lies prone on the ground. A clip of Donald Trump being cruel and narcissistic. O ne evening not long ago, I was doomscrolling on social media, wading through the detritus of our present moment: Videos of terrorists in Israel decapitating a man with a garden hoe.
