On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Serial murderer John Wayne Gacy (1942–1994). Pencil drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.

  John Wayne Gacy (1942–1994) was an American serial killer who raped and murdered thirty-three boys in the 1970s. Gacy, who worked part time as a clown, ensnared young men and boys with bogus magic tricks, eventually trapping and murdering them. He kept the dead bodies near him for many days and then buried them in the crawl space under his home. The journalist Michael Harvey was able to interview Gacy many times after the “killer clown” was caught and imprisoned. Harvey, a lawyer as well as a journalist, uniquely gained Gacy’s confidence because he offered to discuss the legal issues of the case. Harvey spent long hours speaking with Gacy on the phone and in person at the prison. In the end he was the last journalist to speak to Gacy, the night before he was executed by lethal injection. He told me that Gacy had a noticeably cold, detached way of relating to other people: “Gacy very much wanted to depersonalize his victims. He would speak in a monotone as he described the specifics of a particular crime or victim. His eyes would flatten out and empty of any sort of emotion. I think he saw his victims more as objects—like a newspaper or a coffee cup—rather than as people. He would even go so far as to refer to a victim sometimes with the impersonal pronoun ‘it,’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘him.’ ”34

  The Canadian psychologist Robert Hare is probably the foremost authority on psychopathology and crime and is the creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist, a diagnostic tool that measures a subject’s degree of psychopathology and tendency toward violent behavior. In his book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths among Us, Dr. Hare profiles a variety of extreme and moderate psychopaths, arriving at a cluster of symptoms that include deceitfulness, egocentricity, grandiosity, impulsivity, manipulation, and, most important, lack of conscience and lack of empathy.35

  “The world of unfeeling psychopaths is not limited to the popular images of monsters who steal people’s children or kill without remorse,” says Dr. Hare. “After all, if you are bright, you have been brought up with good social skills, and you don’t want to end up in prison, so you probably won’t turn to a life of violence. Rather, you’ll recognize that you can use your psychopathic tendencies more legitimately by getting into positions of power and control. What better place than a corporation?”36 Dr. Hare’s research, from serial killers to corporate psychopaths, only underscores that most deviance occurs in the form of a spectrum rather than binary categories. Of course, many people might think of their boss as a psychopath, but special odium is rightly reserved for violent offenders. “The association between psychopathy and violence should not be surprising,” according to Dr. Hare. “Many of the characteristics important for inhibiting antisocial and violent behavior…are lacking or deficient in psychopaths.”37 Perhaps it will be unsurprising, then, to find that only i percent of the overall population is psychopathic, but around 25 percent of the overall prison population is afflicted.

  Empathy, the ability to identify with another person’s feelings, is significantly missing in people who commit heinous crimes. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick was intrigued when he read about the utter lack of empathy among Nazis. In large part, Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is an exploration of dehumanization. “Although it’s essentially a dramatic novel,” Dick explained, “the moral and philosophical ambiguities it dealt with are really very profound.”

  [The story] stemmed from my basic interest in the problem of differentiating the authentic human being from the reflexive machine, which I call an android. In my mind “android” is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but behaving in a nonhuman way. I first became interested in this problem when I was doing research for High Castle. I had access to prime Gestapo documents at the closed stacks of California at Berkeley, and I came across some diaries by S.S. men stationed in Poland. One sentence in particular had a profound effect on me: “We are kept awake at night by cries of starving children.” There was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote that. I later realized that what we were essentially dealing with in the Nazis was a defective group mind—a mind so emotionally defective that the word human could not be applied to them.38

  Blade Runner (1982), the highly regarded film version of Dick’s novel, centers around the main character, Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), and explores these questions of our humanity. Deckard makes his living as a bounty hunter in the degenerating techno-environment of futuristic Los Angeles. His job is to hunt down and kill (retire) “replicants,” artificial humanoids that have been manufactured as slaves on space stations and are indistinguishable from human beings. This makes them highly dangerous if they should make their way back to earth; hence the need for a small cadre of exterminators (“blade runners”), including Deckard. Replicants are manufactured with short life spans (e.g., four years) and they are given memories, language, and general intellectual skills to maximize their particular slave functions. The plot of the film tracks Deckard as he, in turn, tracks four fugitive replicants who are trying to reach their maker, a genetic engineer and corporate mogul named Tyrell. The premise is philosophical, as these rather likable creatures are on a mission to beg their God to grant them a little more life. As we get to know these characters, other philosophical issues emerge.

  Replicants act as metaphors for the kinds of cold, robotic deviants I’ve been discussing. In the same way that we can wonder about the humanity of the Gestapo officer or the psychopath Paul Beart, the film Blade Runner meditates on replicant contenders for human status. Actually, since human is a zoological term, the real question is: What are the defining traits of a person? And what are the entitlements or rights that personhood entails? These questions go back to Frankenstein and earlier. Beyond simple sensations of pain and pleasure, we tend to think of emotions as crucial ingredients for being a person. Blade Runner offers us replicants with varying degrees of emotional life (pain, hopes, disappointment, desire, etc.). Does something deserve basic rights and respect when it is capable of feeling emotions?39 But not just any feelings will suffice. We recognize certain emotions in animals and yet we do not reward them person status (in fact, we continue to devour them heartily). There seems to be an unspoken premium placed on the emotional levels of sophistication. Fear, for example, is widely prevalent in the animal kingdom, but empathy is an emotion that seems very rare except in the human species. Empathy is the power to place oneself in the position of someone or something else and intimately feel the emotions or motives of that other person or thing.40

  In the film, blade runners are equipped with a special device, the Voight-Kampf test, which enables them to distinguish androids from nonandroids. The device measures the changes in the subject’s pupils when asked increasingly difficult questions, and the questions are designed to elicit empathy responses to scenarios of animal and human suffering (the eye as the window to the soul is a repeated theme throughout the movie). The film suggests that some of the replicants, the character Leon, for example, are rudimentary in their emotional equipment, and this can be easily detected through the empathy test. When Leon is asked what he would do if he came across an overturned tortoise suffering in the sun, he cannot empathically process the scenario. Other characters, such as Roy, evolve emotional sophistication that eventually reaches the level of empathy. The climax of the film, in fact, can be read as a transfiguration of replicant Roy to fully human Roy by the empathic act of saving the life of a fellow sufferer (Deckard). Actually an even deeper transfiguration is implied because Roy saves not only a fellow sufferer, but his enemy.41

  Interestingly, the U.S. military has created a device that looks very much like the Voight-Kampf test, and they use it to scan the eyes of Iraqi men. It has been extremely difficult for U.S. soldiers to differentiate friends from insurgent enemies while fighting in Iraq. The eye scanner is designed to take subtle biometrics rather than detect empathic responses, but the use of such a litmus test on enemies is
somewhat unsettling.

  At least two points are interesting about the empathy test used in Blade Runner. First, we have a kind of deus ex machina or cop-out resolution of the Cartesian problem. How do you know if the thing next to you is a human or an automaton? Give it the empathy test, and if it fails, it’s an android.42 Second, and more interesting, the suggestion that the different replicants have different levels of emotional sophistication (some bordering on real empathy, some completely void) implies that they are different levels of person.

  This reflection takes us beyond the film, for we can legitimately ask this same question of the people around us. There appear to be levels of empathy in human beings, from highly sensitive individuals to cold-blooded psychopathic killers. Does having less empathy mean being less human? When we talk of the emotionless individual, we say that he is “cold,” perhaps even “inhuman.” Is compassion for other beings a defining feature of what it means to be human? Does the inability to feel someone else’s suffering make one less of a person and more like a machine or a monster?

  THE CAUSES OF PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

  Advances in brain science have lent greater credence to the idea that severe deviance has a biological basis. Dr. Igor Galynker of Beth Israel Medical Center scanned the brains of twenty-two pedophiles and found that they all had below normal activity in the temporal lobe. There are rare cases of men with tumors in their temporal lobe region acquiring a taste for sex with children, having the tumors removed, and subsequently losing the deviant urges.43

  The old chicken-and-egg question remains, however; one can always ask whether brain anomalies cause events, or whether events (such as early abuse) cause brain anomalies.44 In some cases, young children who experience violent abuse replicate that abuse as adults, but it remains unclear whether genetic heredity is simply unfolding from genotype to phenotype over generations, or whether the early violent experiences create an unconscious need for revenge (the return of the repressed), or whether childhood abuse actually rearranges the brain in such a way that later callous behavior is more likely. With regard to psychopaths, there seems to be some evidence for all of these causal scenarios.45

  Dr. Kent A. Kiehl, a psychiatrist at the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center in Connecticut, studies the relationship between psychopathol-ogy and the brain. According to Kiehl, psychopaths do not fail cognitively so much as fail compassionately: “Psychopaths do know right from wrong, they can tell you right from wrong. They just don’t care.”46 Dr. Kiehl believes there is compelling evidence that psychopaths have abnormal paralimbic systems. The paralimbic system consists of several structures and coordinates emotion and long-term memory. People with damage to their orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the paralimbic system, display increased impulsivity and selfishness; those with damage to the amygdala, another part of the paralimbic system, become cold-hearted and lose their natural fear of threats. Experiments using photographs confirm that people with a damaged amygdala cannot identify dangerous people as dangerous. As Dr. Melvin Konner puts it, “Without an amygdala we are too trusting and bold in approaching people who look dangerous to others.”47 When subjected to brain scans, psychopaths display some of the same diminished brain activity in these paralimbic areas that injured subjects display. Other tests confirm that areas of the brain that ordinarily process or read facial expressions are crippled in psychopaths; notably, the ability to process fearful faces is diminished, according to Dr. Nicola Gray of Cardiff University’s School of Psychiatry.48 Not only is it harder for psychopaths to read threatening faces, but more significantly, it is harder for them to interpret the faces of people who are afraid. If a psychopath is neurologically less responsive to my pained face (and other indicators), then he might be less likely to stop hurting me if we end up in conflict.

  These cases of diminished brain activity in specific loci give us a glimpse into the places where empathy breaks down. Psychopaths may be perceiving other people in purely morphological ways, without sensing much of their inner life (pain, joy, etc.). When most normal people cause pain to another person or just witness it, they have some sympathetic pain themselves. This does not appear to be the case with psychopaths. This has led some researchers to wonder if psychopaths, like some autistics, have a reduced ability to attribute mental states (intentions, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc.) to other people and to understand that others experience subjective states that are different from their own. In other words, the failure of empathy may be a result of a weakened theory of mind.49

  That psychopaths can be highly intelligent and calculating but heartless is the subject of Ralph Adolphs’s research at the California Institute of Technology.50 Dr. Adolphs recruited thirty men and women to answer fifty carefully crafted questions involving ethical dilemmas. Six of the subjects had lesions on their ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a region just behind the forehead; twelve of the subjects had other types of brain damage, and the final twelve had no brain damage whatsoever. The ethical quandaries were broken down into two categories: personal and impersonal. In the personal quandaries, subjects were asked “lifeboat” questions, such as, If you had to harm your friend in order to save a large number of other people, could you do it? The cold calculation of utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number) tends to run counter to our natural attachments to people we know. Part of us naturally privileges our own people because we have strong emotional ties to them, whereas strangers (no matter how many) are abstract; we are not emotionally invested in them. Yet even harming a stranger in order to save other strangers usually causes a high degree of aversion in subjects; most normal people hesitate because they feel compassion for the individual who must be sacrificed. While all the other test subjects showed great anxiety and hesitation at the idea of harming a person in order to save others, the people with VMPC lesions were quick and decisive in their decision to sacrifice an individual for the common good. The researchers argued that abnormalities in the VMPC result in lower levels of empathy and compassion.

  These biological approaches to psychological tendencies are not strictly reductionistic. For example, the sociobiologist Linda Mealy argued that a form of psychopathy could be genetically passed down, but only an abusive environmental situation might trigger its expression.51 Many people may have dormant psychopathic genes that get triggered only by high-stress hormonal environments. If a child grows up in an abusive home, he may produce the high degree of steroid hormones that trigger psychopathic gene expression, whereas a stable, nurturing family environment might indefinitely gate or prevent psychopathic gene expression.

  The journalist Michael Harvey, who spent time with John Wayne Gacy and several other heinous murderers, reminds us of the developmental component of psychopathy:

  The common link that binds together most serial killers can be found, perhaps not surprisingly, in childhood. If you dig deep enough, you will find that most serial killers experienced sexual abuse or some other sort of significant physical and mental abuse at the hands of an adult, usually a parent or some other person acting in a position of trust. Often, this abuse is coupled with neglect and general indifference exhibited by other adults who might have been in a position to stop the abuse or otherwise comfort the child who was the subject of the abuse. A typical scenario would be a father who is abusive and a mother who is cold and distant.52

  In chapter 8 I spent considerable time discussing medieval demon possession. The demon monsters of that more theocentric era were slowly transformed by the medical model into diseases. Nowadays sin and possession have become laughable terms in the official culture of mental pathology. But Carl Jung, in his 1927 Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, suggested that we have actually gained little with our new scientific nomenclature of mental illness. “Three hundred years ago,” Jung writes, “a woman was said to be possessed of the devil, now we say she has hysteria. Formerly a sufferer was said to be bewitched, now the trouble is called a neurotic dyspepsia. The facts are the same; only the previous
explanation, psychologically speaking, is almost exact, whereas our rationalistic description of symptoms is really without content.”53

  The point here is that, for the psychopath, no breakdown of his condition into brain chemistry even begins to get at the actual felt experience he’s undergoing. From the phenomenological or psychological perspective, demon possession is a more accurate way of describing the horrible feeling of an uncontrollable invisible force pushing you to do something against your will. The feeling of being controlled by something foreign to oneself is probably the same, no matter what era one lives in. The superstitions of the earlier age are now metaphysically ridiculous, but the subjective experience is better captured by reference to unnatural agencies than to neurotransmitters.54

  JUDGING AND MANAGING THE MONSTERS

  “There is absolutely no doubt that people do monstrous things,” says Judge David P. Brodsky. “Don’t get me wrong. I mean, it’s unbelievable, the things I’ve seen. There are some sick people out there, who cross the line in no small way. But if we’re going to be a civilized society, then we have to struggle with the real complexities of crime, and not the cartoon versions of ‘saints’ versus ‘monsters.’” In 2008, I interviewed Judge Brodsky, who was an attorney for the Public Defender’s Office in Lake County, Illinois, for over two decades and who now works as an associate judge in the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Illinois. He thinks the media, with their simplistic “monster” labels, are partly to blame for overdramatizing criminals and closing off real understanding: “The media has an invested interest in fostering these dehumanizing labels—it makes for ‘good TV,’ it creates ratings and profits.” Add to that the fear-mongering of politicians who are “tough on crime” and you have a recipe for public misperception, a picture of crime and punishment that bears little resemblance to reality. “One of the other problems,” Brodsky says, “is that mass communication, by its very nature, tends to oversimplify a message. So when [reporters] cover crime, the complexities are eliminated and criminals get transformed into ‘monsters.’”