On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears
Page 1
ON MONSTERS
ON MONSTERS
AN UNNATURAL HISTORY OF OUR WORST FEARS
Stephen T. Asma
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Copyright © 2009 by Stephen T. Asma
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Asma, Stephen T.
On monsters : an unnatural history of our worst fears / Stephen T. Asma.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-533616-0
1. Monsters. I. Title.
GR825.A86 2009
398.24’54—dc22
2009007219
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For my favorite little monster, Julien—
cast from no mold, spinning out of control, and beautiful.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Extraordinary Beings
Phobias • Repulsion and Attraction • Inhuman •
Unthinkable • Unmanageable • The Literal and the Symbolic
PART 1 — ANCIENT MONSTERS
1 Alexander Fights Monsters in India
Embellishing • Manliness
2 Monsters Are Nature’s Playthings
Griffins • Monstrous Bones • Natural History and Credulity • Monstrous Races
3 Hermaphrodites and Man-headed Oxen
In-between Beings • Reason and Superstition •
Aristotle’s Monsters • Phantom Images
4 Monstrous Desire
Plato’s Monster • Monstrous Mother
PART 2 — MEDIEVAL MONSTERS: MESSAGES FROM GOD
5 Biblical Monsters
God’s Lackeys • The Apocalypse • Giants
6 Do Monsters Have Souls?
Monsters and a Creator God • Baptizing the Monstrous Races •
The Descent of Monsters • Alexander’s Gates
7 The Monster Killer
“I Have Known Much Peril” • Tolkien’s Tragic Beowulf
8 Possessing Demons and Witches
St. Anthony Fights the Demons • Witches • The Witch Hunter
Illusion or Reality? • Monstrous Desires Revisited • Driving Out the Demons
PART 3 — SCIENTIFIC MONSTERS: THE BOOK OF NATURE IS
RIDDLED WITH TYPOS
9 Natural History, Freaks, and Nondescripts
The Hydra • Eradicating the Fantastic •
Responding to the Marvelous • A Mischievous Taxidermist • Freaks
10 The Medicalization of Monsters
Monstrous Births • Pregnant Women Should Not Look
upon Monsters • Monsters and the Mechanization of Nature •
Frankenstein • John Hunter’s Monsters • Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s
Teratology • William Lawrence and the Headless Children
11 Darwin’s Mutants
Monsters and Transmutation • No Monstrous Jumps in Nature •
Mutationism and Hopeful Monsters • Alberch, Gould,
and the Return of the Monsters • Evo-Devo
PART 4 — INNER MONSTERS: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS
12 The Art of Human Vulnerability: Angst and Horror
Fear and Cognitive Mismatch • Angst and Fear •
Freud • Torture Porn • Creeping Flesh
13 Criminal Monsters: Psychopathology, Aggression,
and the Malignant Heart
Monsters in the Headlines • Leopold and Loeb •
Rage and Aggression • Monstrous Desire Revisited • Cold Detachment
The Causes of Psychopathology • Judging and Managing the Monsters
PART V — MONSTERS TODAY AND TOMORROW
14 Torturers, Terrorists, and Zombies:
The Products of Monstrous Societies
Xenophobia and Race • Theoretical Xenophobia • Instinctual
Xenophobia • Monstrous Civilizations • Pathological Societies • Monsters
from the Oppressed Classes • Monsters of Ideology • Deconstructing Monsters
15 Future Monsters:
Robots, Mutants, and Posthuman Cyborgs
Mutants and Robots • Cyborgs • Disembodied Minds
Playing God: Biotechnology • Are Monsters in the Eye of the Beholder?
Epilogue
Notes • Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WINSTON CHURCHILL ONCE said that “writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.”
I have written half a dozen books now, and I think Churchill has captured the process perfectly. I am happy to fling this monster out to the public. But I’m proud of it, and I’ll probably miss my long servitude to it. Of course no monster gets built alone; even Dr. Frankenstein had Igor’s help (at least in the movies). At the risk of offending my friends and family by associating them with a hunchbacked imbecile, I wish to thank my many collaborators.
My family is a team of tireless supporters. Heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Ed and Carol, and brothers, Dave and Dan, plus the entire Asma tribe. My dearest Wen and Julien waited patiently for Baba to climb out of the laboratory; I am grateful for their patience and their help with the voltage generators, test tubes, and that one time when we had to beat back the torch-wielding villagers.
Anatomy was frowned upon in the eighteenth century, and the body snatchers who dug up cadavers for secret scientific study were known as “resurrection men.” My resurrection men were Bob Long and Roland Hansen, both of whom exhumed obscure texts and sources. A writer could not ask for better research assistants. Lauren Dubeau and Loni Diep helped me find many wonderful images of monsters. Joanna Ebenstein, David Driesbach, and Peter Olson very generously contributed their own excellent artwork to the book.
I am grateful to Steve Kapelke, provost of Columbia College, for having the vision to create a “distinguished scholar” rank and for having the lapse of good judgment to name me as one. Complicit in this happy gaffe were my chair, Lisa Brock, and Deans Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Deborah Holdstein. I’m thankful to many other friends at Columbia College, including Sara Livingston, Garnet Kilberg Cohen, Kate Hamerton, Teresa Prados-Torreira, Micki Leventhal, Keith Cleveland, Oscar Valdez, Krista Macewko, Jeff Abel, and drinking partner Baheej Khleif.
This book and my intellectual life would be m
uch poorer if it wasn’t for my small and voracious reading group, Tom Greif and Rami Gabriel. Many thanks to them for reading large chunks of this book, but also for weekly torture sessions with obscure philosophers, evolutionary psychologists, cognitive scientists, revolutionaries, and more.
Many others need to be thanked: Alex Kafka, Kendrick Frazier, Raja Halwani, Gianofer Fields, Pei Lun, Michael Shermer, Donna Seaman, Robyn Von Swank, Adrienne Mayor, Leigh Novak, Jim Graham, Greg Brandenburgh, Jim Krantz, Harold Henderson, Doctor Swing, Michael Harvey, the honorable David Brodsky, wingman Brian Wingert, Tomo and Dave Eddington, and all my friends at Lake Shore Unitarian Society in Winnetka, Illinois. Special thanks to my excellent editor at Oxford, Cybele Tom, who believed in this monstrous project and also helped amputate its unnecessary tentacles, and to Christine Dahlin and Judith Hoover. As always, I alone am responsible for the flaws of my creature.
ON MONSTERS
What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame.
BLAISE PASCAL
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Introduction
Extraordinary Beings
PHOBIAS
EVER SINCE I WAS A SMALL BOY I’ve had a phobia about deep murky water, or more accurately, a fear of what might be living in such waters. A seemingly harmless swim in a weedy lake sends my imagination into overdrive and I can almost see the behemoths and leviathans rising up to gnaw off my extremities. I’m a grown man, for God’s sake, and a skeptic as well. But no amount of reasoning with myself can begin to dispel the apprehension. I’ve never ruined a beach picnic by refusing to get in the water, nor have I needed to be talked down from an anxiety attack. Like most other “lite” phobics I just cringe a little bit and get on with the swimming. I’m annoyed by my irrational fear of sea monsters, but I’ve resigned myself to coping with it.
When I was living in Cambodia I occasionally went swimming in the muddy Mekong, but I winced at the idea that more species of giant fish live in the Mekong than in any other river in the world. Mekong catfish can grow to be eight or nine feet long and weigh between six hundred and seven hundred pounds, and goliath freshwater stingrays can be over twelve hundred pounds. Moving geographically to the deep seas of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, one finds an enormously long silvery snake-like beast called an oarfish. This nightmarish fish lives at depths of three thousand feet and has been seen and captured only after rare surfacing episodes due to illness. This ribbon-like giant, with striking red-headed “plumage,” can grow up to fifty feet in length and probably inspired many early sailor tales of sea monsters. Add to this sort of oddity the fact that every once in a while science dredges up some hitherto unknown specimen from the deep, such as the ancient coelacanth or rare evidence of the giant squid.1 I can almost hear my reptilian brain telling my neocortex, “See, I told you! Don’t go in the water.” But these real monsters are nothing compared to the nefarious beasts that swim in my head. These are modified versions of the real creatures, but always with sharper and more copious dentition, more poisonous dorsal spikes, and more razor-like claws for effortless laceration. And of course they’re bigger too.
The Kraken is a mythical sea monster that has troubled sailors’ dreams for centuries. The legend may be based on glimpses of giant squids or abnormally large octopi. Drawing of the Kraken, complete with faux scientific nomenclature, by artist Peter Olson © 2008. Reprinted by kind permission of the artist. www.peterolsonbirds.com.
When the first two crazy people, I mean scientists, descended a quarter of a mile into the ocean in a crude bathysphere, they found unimaginable creatures. Off a Bermudan island in 1930 William Beebe and Otis Barton witnessed swarms of bioluminescent creatures—transparent eels, shrimp, and nightmarish fish—and giant shadowy figures looming just outside the range of their spotlight. They could descend only a fraction of the actual sea depth, but when asked to describe the receding waters below them, Beebe said that the abyss “looked like the black pit-mouth of hell itself.”2
A survey of popular culture indicates that I am not alone in my fear of sea monsters. Television, movies, and video games are rife with neck-tensing narratives about underwater peril. The literature and imagery of high culture, too, have long been fascinated with the idea of watery fiends.3 But there may be deeper reasons, below the stratum of culture, for the ubiquitous sea monster phobia. Evolution may have built this into our species over the span of many prehistoric millennia. Fear of murky water may have been a good survival strategy for ancestors who regularly fell victim to real predators; trepidation at water’s edge may have been just the thing that helped some hominids to leave progeny. This is speculative, but it is consistent with basic Darwinian assumptions about the evolution of instincts.
In a telling passage from The Descent of Man, Darwin scandalously compares the intellects and emotions of humans and animals.4 He tells several stories of his experiments at the Zoological Gardens, in particular his research at the monkey house. Darwin knew that monkeys had an “instinctive dread” of snakes, so he took a dead, stuffed, and coiled-up snake down to the monkey house. “The excitement thus caused was one of the most curious spectacles which I ever beheld,” he wrote. A stuffed snake was too horrifying and the monkeys stayed far away from it, but a dead fish, a mouse, and even a live turtle eventually drew the monkeys in and they displayed no fear in handling them. Pushing the experiment further, Darwin placed a live snake in a bag and put this inside the cage. “One of the monkeys immediately approached, cautiously opened the bag a little, peeped in, and instantly dashed away.” But then, in a human-like act of curiosity, “monkey after monkey, with head raised high and turned on one side, could not resist taking a momentary peep into the upright bag, at the dreadful object lying quietly at the bottom.”5
To monkeys, snakes are monstrously threatening and so their instincts err on the side of caution. In a state of nature many snakes are real threats; from an evolutionary point of view, any monkeys that happened to be extra timid around them probably lived to procreate another day. One might say that monkeys have an emotional caricature of snakes in their instinctual vocabulary. The monsters of our human imagination may be similar caricatures, originally built on legitimate threats but eventually spiraling into the autonomous elaborations that only big brains can produce. In my brain, the piranha becomes the Loch Ness Monster.
Arachnophobia, or fear of spiders, seems to be a universal human dread, especially in children. The biologist Tim Flannery asks, “Why do so many of us react so strongly, and with such primal fear, to spiders? The world is full of far more dangerous creatures such as stinging jellyfish, stonefish, and blue ringed octopi that—by comparison—appear to barely worry most people.”6 Flannery speculates that a Darwinian story connects human arachnophobia to our African prehistory. Because Homo sapiens emerged in Africa, he wonders whether a species or genus of spider could have been present as an environmental pressure. Africa is the place where the human mind acquired many of its useful instincts. If humans evolved in an environment with venomous spiders, a phobia could have been advantageous for human survival and could be expected to gain greater frequency in the larger human population. The six-eyed sand spider of western and southern Africa actually fits that speculation very well. It is a crab-like spider that hides in the sand and leaps out to capture prey; its venom is extremely harmful to children. One can see how a fear of spiders would have been highly advantageous in this context. Our contemporary arachnophobia may be a leftover from our prehistory on the savanna.7
Many mons
ter archetypes seem to tap into widespread arachnophobia. Some evolutionary psychologists believe that spider and snake phobias are the result of natural selection. Pencil drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.
In recent cognitive science debates, fears of snakes, spiders, and other creatures have been held up as examples of preset mental circuits in the human brain.8 Though it is a controversial idea, a growing number of theorists argue that our brains come hard-wired with some belief content, such as “snakes = bad.” The fact that phobias seem so resistant to revision in light of new experiences suggests that they are closed information systems. Even after a phobic person is told that a snake is not poisonous or witnesses the removal of the venom ducts, he or she still dreads handling the reptile. The phobia stays like a stubborn piece of antiquated furniture in the architecture of the mind.9 Perhaps monsters are also part of our furnished mind. As cultural and psychological realities, monsters certainly seem unwilling to go away, no matter how much light we shine in their direction.
More important for my thesis, however, is the wonderfully ambivalent tension in Darwin’s zoo monkeys. The monkey cannot fully confront the snake, but he cannot leave it alone either. He is repelled and attracted. Of course, we are just like him; we cannot “resist taking a momentary peep…at the dreadful object lying quietly at the bottom.”
REPULSION AND ATTRACTION
While perusing the disturbing deformed specimens at the Hunterian Museum in London,10 I found myself standing beside a young boy and his mother. We were all staring at a display case that contained a series of tragically malformed babies floating in large jars of alcohol.