As an example, Harry Potter's friend Hermione becomes obsessed with elf rights when she discovers that elves are enslaved throughout the wizarding world, forced to work without pay, denied clothing and treated as subhuman. Yet elves are nearly as intelligent as human beings, if somewhat simple-minded in their slavish, magic-enforced commitment to their lives of service.
Hermione starts the Society for the Promotion of Elf Welfare, S.P.E.W., and tries to raise the consciousness of her classmates at Hogwarts. But her abolitionism meets with the same opposition that the opponents of slavery met 200 ago. "They're happy that way." "They aren't human."
Once Hermione is sensitized to the human-racism in the treatment of elves she begins to recognize it in the discrimination suffered by her werewolf and half-giant teachers. Then she makes a much more fundamental connection—human-racism against intelligent nonhumans is connected to the aristocratic racism against "muggles" (non-magical humans) and "mudbloods" (magical people with non-magical parents) central to Lord Voldemort's fascism.
Refusing to recognize the basic dignity of intelligent nonhuman persons on racial grounds is only one step removed from the belief that some humans are biologically superior to others. Antifascist leader and school headmaster Albus Dumbledore also makes the connection when he grants elves rights, hires nonhumans and reaches out to the despised giants, counseling "we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided."
From aliens to posthumans
For the past 10 years I've been building a database of images of nonhuman intelligence in bestselling novels, top grossing films and popular television. I have suspected that the way these characters are portrayed reflects the popular mindset towards cultural difference in general, and lays the groundwork for the acceptance of actual intelligent nonhumans as citizens of our societies. As Donna Haraway writes in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," "Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imagination."
In recent years the intellectual polarization of transhumanists and human-racists has given new weight to what my wife had seen as just an excuse to read and watch a lot of science fiction. Stuart Newman and Jeremy Rifkin have filed their patent on a human-chimp chimera to stop all chimeric research and force the US government to decide how "human" you have to be to not be property. Wesley J. Smith has declared transhumanists "the next threat to human dignity," since we, as do animal rights activists, don't believe humanness should confer rights.
Despite the rising tide of human-racist reaction, I believe the popular tide is turning towards a concept of citizenship based on personhood and not DNA. I see this cultural progress in the treatment of nonhumans in fantasies such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, science fiction such as Star Trek and Star Wars, and even horror novels such as the positive vampire role models of Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Proving my point in a satisfactorily statistical way is another matter however.
My database includes depictions of nonhuman intelligence in bestselling hardback novels since 1895, the top 30 films each year since 1950 (by US box office receipts) and the top 10 Nielsen-rated television shows. I've been collecting and coding five types of depictions in particular:
The five-point scale
Of course the inclusion criteria are a little arbitrary. For instance, I excluded animated talking creatures even though a central theme of a movie such as Roger Rabbit is that "toons" are a subjugated, intelligent nonhuman species. I've also excluded witches, even though they are often depicted as having a genetic basis to their powers, but included vampires since their posthuman transformation usually has a crypto-biological explanation.
And the challenge of choosing depictions to code pales next to the challenge of coding. In the simple-minded fashion of the quantitative sociologist (that appalls real culture critics) I've devised a five-point scale, from "-2" for very anti-nonhuman to "+2" for very pro-nonhuman, to sum up each book, TV show and film:
Complex depictions
Of course, as with all sociological research, I validated this coding schema by subjecting 120 students in my sociology class to my eye-poppingly absurd ideas, and then requiring them to rate 200 depictions on this five-point scale. Although 120 white, middle-class American 18- to 22-year-olds are probably more representative of the zeitgeist than I am, they still have their limitations. I suspect that the idea of illegal alien immigrants in Men in Black looks a lot different to someone from Nicaragua.
But the final complexity of the study is how exactly the cultural product reflects the zeitgeist. Authors of a book or script are responding to their society when they write, and then their product is filtered through and reshaped by the biases of agents, editors, producers, financiers, directors and advertisers. Philip K. Dick writes a paranoid reflection on McCarthyite America in 1966 and then in 1990 his mutant-loving, anti-corporate story becomes Total Recall, shaped by a lefty Dutch director and a liberal Hollywood, becoming a smash hit in a US tiring of 10 years of Reaganism. There is a lot going on in every cultural product, and it's hard to say whether the depictions of nonhuman intelligence really had anything to do with the way it was received.
Using my elaborate schema and database I haven't been able to prove squat, one way or the other, basically because the depictions are getting increasingly complex. We've moved from the cheerful aliens in My Favorite Martian and Alf to the complex paranoia of X-Files. Human-animal chimeras went from being superheroes (Spiderman) or super-villains (Catwoman) to the revolutionary subalterns of Dark Angel. Robots evolved from Will Robinson's and Princess Leia's lovable servants and 2001's murderous HAL to Star Trek's Data and the persecuted robots of AI trying to prove that they are human enough to have human rights.
What is clear is that as the transhuman transition approaches, these cultural venues are the few places where the citizenship of nonhumans is being seriously debated—from Captain Picard's defense of Data's rights, to Hermione's defense of elves to the complex moral universe of Buffy and Angel. These depictions make explicit the connections between racism against humans and human-racism against nonhumans. They externalize our anxieties about the possibility of a transhuman democracy, and allow us to start adjusting ourselves to its imminent arrival.