The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

by Steven Pinker

In Worse than War, a history of 20th-century genocide, the political scientist Daniel Goldhagen points out that not all genocides have the same causes. He classifies them according to whether the victim group is dehumanized (a target of moralized disgust), demonized (a target of moralized anger), both, or neither.114 A dehumanized group may be exterminated like vermin, such as the Hereros in the eyes of German colonists, Armenians in the eyes of Turks, black Darfuris in the eyes of Sudanese Muslims, and many indigenous peoples in the eyes of European settlers. A demonized group, in contrast, is thought to be equipped with the standard human reasoning faculties, which makes them all the more culpable for embracing a heresy or rejecting the one true faith. Among these modern heretics were the victims of communist autocracies, and the victims of their opposite number, the right wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, and El Salvador. Then there are the out-and-out demons—groups that manage to be both repulsively subhuman and despicably evil. This is how the Nazis saw the Jews, and how Hutus and Tutsis saw each other. Finally, there may be groups that are not reviled as evil or subhuman but are feared as potential predators and eliminated in preemptive attacks, such as in the Balkan anarchy following the breakup of Yugoslavia.