Car-People

We talk about dehumanization as if it were a switch, something that happens in atrocities and history books. But maybe it's a dial, when we're constantly turning, all day long. Full humanity is something we really only grant in one direction: to ourselves. And sometimes to the rare person who seems more human than ourselves. Everyone else gets docked. Every difference is a subtraction: skin color, clothing, accent, wealth, age, the wrong shoes. What's left after the subtractions is something less than a whole person, though we'd never say so out loud.

The strange part is what happens when a person merges with an object or a category. Road rage exists, I'd bet, partly because a car isn't a person and the driver isn't quite one either. The two fuse into a third thing, a car-person, and you can scream at a car-person in a way you never would at a man standing in line with you at the pharmacy. The same fusion happens everywhere once you look for it. The uniform-person: we say things to a waiter or a customer service rep that we would not say to the same human being at a barbecue. The speaker-box person at the drive-thru. The helmet-person on the motorcycle, who reads as equipment. The jersey-person at the game, who is not a father of three but an emissary of the enemy. The crowd-person, who has no face at all. In every case the humanity isn't erased, exactly. It's diluted, by whatever the person is wearing or riding or standing behind.

So what does that make people on the internet? They have no bodies at all. They're disembodied voices, closer to the voices in your own head than to the man at the pharmacy. And you don't owe the voices in your head any courtesy. You argue with them, dismiss them, mock them. I think this explains a good deal of how we treat each other online. We are not being cruel to people. We are being cruel to thought-people, and some part of us honestly believes no one is there.

But the dial turns the other way too, and this is the part that interests me. An author, through a book, is also disembodied, more so than anyone on the internet, sometimes dead for centuries, nothing left but the voice. And yet the good ones land in that first category, the one we almost never grant: more human than ourselves. You can feel a greater genuine human presence in thirty pages of a dead person's writing than in a month of dinner parties. The thoughts and the spirit come through so strongly that they overcome every subtraction. No body, no face, no shared century. The deficit runs backward into surplus.

Which suggests the dial was never really measuring difference. It was measuring how much of the inside of another person we're able to perceive. The car, the uniform, the screen name all hide the inside, so we round down. The book is nothing but the inside. And there we round up, past ourselves, to the full humanity we otherwise reserve for the person in the mirror.