According to empiricist theories of the self, the contents of consciousness, the inner life, is in large part conditioned by the external environment. In this tradition, the ideas of the soul or mind are simply internal copies of bodily sense impressions. A constant thread through such empiricism is Locke’s claim that confused minds result from erroneous conflations of impressions. Any interesting epistemology must account not only for our knowledge but for our more abundant ignorance. So, Locke claims, “whole societies of men” are worked into “universal perverseness” because unrelated experiences “of no alliance to one another, are, by education, custom, and the constant din of their party, so coupled in their minds, that they always appear there together” and become confused as one idea.11 This position would later support racial theorists such as the empirically oriented American Jeffersonians.
The early anthropology of the American Philosophical Society, whose inner circle included such thinkers as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, centered around whether Indians, blacks, and whites were members of the same species. The empirically oriented philosophers argued that the races had a common origin, but the current “depravity” of Indians and blacks was a result of poor environment: unhealthy external conditions resulted in internal retrograde souls. Rush, for example, stated, “The weakness of the intellects in certain savage and barbarous nations…is as much the effect of the want of physical influence upon their minds, as a disagreeable color and figure are of its action upon their bodies.”12 A post-Darwinian expression of this same external model of racial causality can be found in Edward Drinker Cope’s 1883 assertion that “every peculiarity of the body has probably some corresponding significance in the mental, and the cause of the former are the remoter causes of the latter.”13
The metaphor of external causation did indeed allow theorists to indulge in justifications for prejudice. However, the explanation of racial variations via empirical environmentalism is not in itself inherently pernicious. Obviously it’s a dangerous blunder to argue from one’s environment to one’s skin color to one’s morally significant mental status, but the externalist metaphor has also been the driving force behind some arguments for the fundamental unity of humankind and the moral equality of all races. The advantage of thinking of the mind (and race) as environmentally produced is that it eliminates dangerous forms of essentialism. Normal or abnormal, mundane or monstrous—no group was essentially fixed or eternally different; they simply had different geographical biographies. Of course, this racial relativism was not applied fairly in many cases. Jefferson himself conveniently suggested that although Indians are certainly capable of the most refined capacities of our species, Negroes may not be so capable; thus a certain theoretical justification for American slavery could remain in place. Obviously, this was a perniciously inconsistent application of the theory. But if applied consistently the environmental theory can legitimate a moral egalitarianism in the face of racial variation.
If race is simply a response to particular external stimuli, then given enough time (and the geological revolution finally convinced us that there is enough time), an environmentally transposed black population and white population would eventually take on each other’s traits. For if we take Darwinian natural selection seriously, we must recognize that there is no trait that is so essential that it cannot become, in time, accidental, and even nonexistent. And there is no trait that is so accidental that it cannot become, in time, essential to a race or species. That is to say, the age-old concepts of essence and accident are exploded. Unfortunately, many such theories were still wed to the ancient idea of a hierarchical scala naturae and presupposed that one could “improve” the savage (raise him to the “higher” white or European level of the ladder) by altering his environment.
By contrast, a Cartesian model of the self, mixed with prejudice, becomes an odious framework for thinking racial differences to be eternal and forever fixed.14 Indeed, such a framework was articulated in American polygeny theory, whereby internal selves were expressed through external racial characteristics. Naturalists in the nineteenth century divided roughly into two camps: the polygenists, who argued for several distinct origins of the races, and the monogenists, who argued for one origin for all humankind. Prior to Darwin, the inquiry centered around whether there was one Adam and Eve or many (multiple creations). After Darwin, the discourse shifted slightly to inquire into whether the species had one origin with several evolved racial variations, or whether each race constituted its own species, having only a very remote connection to others. Polygenists, both before and after Darwin, embraced the internalist or essentialist idea of fixed races. The African descendant, the Native American descendant, and the Caucasian descendant all represented fixed kinds of diverse entities, taking their diversity from some innately bestowed respective essence (usually granted by God). American polygenists, such as Dr. Samuel George Morton, were very popular prior to the Civil War because their internalist metaphor left no room for change in the contemporary racial hierarchy. An internal soul immune from environmental conditions was said to eternally define the slave, from ancient times to the present.
The polygenist idea of races as originally and essentially distinct was a harbinger of the Nazi ideology. The Nazis rejected monogenism because the idea that all races had a common origin lent itself to the democratic contention that Jews, blacks, and Aryans were essentially brothers and sisters, descendants of common parent stock. The polygenist doctrine of eternal divisions between races made it easy to think of the souls of other races (if they had them) as fundamentally other. Thus no amount of external environmental influence could alter the essence of the Jew or the Asian. George Mosse describes this Nazi opposition to the monogenist theory that all races evolved from one source: “As National Socialism and the Volkish movement claimed that the German race was perfection incarnate, that its greatness was immutable, the idea of racial evolution and progress had to be rejected.”15 Adolf Hitler himself invoked this theme of eternal racial identity and rejected the empiricist view of the self when he stated, “A man can change his language without any trouble—that is, he can use another language; but in his new language he will express the old ideas; his inner nature is not changed. This is best shown by the Jew who can speak a thousand languages and nevertheless remain a Jew. His traits of character have remained the same, whether two thousand years ago as a grain dealer in Ostia, speaking Roman, or whether as a flour profiteer of today, jabbering German with a Jewish accent. It is always the same Jew.”16
INSTINCTUAL XENOPHOBIA
Why do we transform other groups, whole races, into monsters? This is an important question. The kind of theoretical explanation that I’ve been sketching may be ascribing more rational decision-making behavior to racists than really occurs. All such arguments tend to take the form because it is economically or socially advantageous to see other races as inferior, we elect to see them as inferior. The argument implies some sort of conscious decision making, or at least a social calculation. But the treatment of other races as monstrous may be more instinctual.17 Specifically, it may be the result of xenophobia, a neurotic exaggeration of an otherwise low-level but ever-present instinctual fear. Fear and anxiety are ubiquitous in humans; they are reported to be the most common emotions in our dream lives. Just as some psychiatric disorders may be intensified modulations of ordinary feelings like fear, so, too, whole societies may suffer from intensified fears, especially if their mass media stimulates such feelings. Treating strangers as monsters may be the neurotic cultural response of a paranoid society. Being afraid is a given part of the human condition, as is suspicion about people and creatures that are different. But if widespread fears are systematically trained upon another population, it won’t be long before that population really is a threat because their subsequent feelings of defensiveness and victimization are surefire paths to hostile countermeasures.
“Us-versus-them thinking comes remarkably easily to us,” says the primate bio
logist Frans de Waal.18 He finds the demonization of others to be strong in primate communities as well: “There is no question that chimpanzees are xenophobic.” Jane Goodall described some chimp aggression toward out-group members as so violent and degrading that it was clear that the chimps were treating their enemies as members of some other species. De Waal also describes such behavior: “One attacker might pin down the victim (sitting on his head, holding his legs) while others bit, hit, and pounded. They would twist off a limb, rip out a trachea, remove fingernails, literally drink blood pouring from wounds, and in general not let up until their victim stopped moving.” Chimps, like humans, can perceive their enemies as monsters and then respond with torture and other forms of excessive brutality. Perceived monsters bring out monstrous reactions.
A community of chimps in Gombe National Park in Tanzania demonstrates some interesting xenophobic behavior. In the beginning it was a large group of chimps who socialized with each other and functioned like a unified clan. Over the years, however, the group split into northern and southern subgroups. Eventually the two groups began to fight with each other and define each other as hostile out-groups. “Shocked researchers watched as former friends now drank each other’s blood,” de Waal writes. Biologists extend the point to human hostilities, such as those of the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and the Muslims, Serbs, and Croats in Bosnia. De Waal speculates that when groups feel a sense of common purpose, they suppress their aggression toward other in-group members. But remove that common purpose, and look out. “Both humans and chimps are gentle, or at least restrained, toward members of their own group, yet both can be monsters to those on the outside.”
So strong is the xenophobia in chimps that researchers fail whenever they attempt to introduce new members into a clan. If they bring excaptive chimps, for example, to a wild clan, the new chimps are always met with violence, and the integration experiment usually has to be aborted. On the other hand, such tribalism appears to carry strong bonds of loyalty. When de Waal introduced two males to a group at the Yerkes Primate Center, he was surprised to observe two females approach and defend one of the newcomers, Jimoh. The other chimp was received with the usual violence, but not Jimoh. The two females groomed him and protected him from the other hostile chimps. Sometime later de Waal discovered that fourteen years earlier, Jimoh had been in another institution with the same two females, who recognized him and now protected him as one of their own.
MONSTROUS CIVILIZATIONS
Here at the beginning of our century we find much of the explicitly racial xenophobia being replaced by talk of a “clash of civilizations.” The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington prognosticated a future drama between post–cold war world powers in his influential and vaguely paranoid essay “The Clash of Civilizations,” where he argued that, after the cold war, international politics would move out of its Western phase (i.e., the battles between liberal democracy, fascism, and communism) and become the clash between Western and non-Western civilizations: “In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.”19 Western nation-states, Huntington argued, must align with each other in order to be strong and resilient in the coming clash with the East.
The idea that foreign cultures are threatening because their cultural values exclude or compete with one’s own is certainly contentious, but it is, rightly or wrongly, a dominant position of late. With almost three thousand innocent Americans killed on 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, the Patriot Act, repeated embassy and subway bombings, and so on, many people on either side of the East/West divide feel anxious about the new out-groups. These new monsters are hard to pinpoint and isolate. Such a creature has no corporeal body to fight or dismember; it has no lair to infiltrate, no specific skin color, no national boundary. It is everywhere and nowhere. Global terrorism has given us all fresh opportunities to be afraid, both reasonably and unreasonably. We are in a new culture war now, one that nourishes its hostile imagination every day with the real blood of East/West conflict.
Xenophobia goes both ways, of course. Islamic fundamentalism constructs a specific American monster. We are seen as godless, consumerist zombies, soulless hedonists without honor, family, or purpose.20 Ayatollah Khomeini famously referred to the United States in a 1979 speech as “the great Satan.” Along with disgust at U.S. imperialism, some fundamentalist Muslims conceive of average Americans as docile cogs in a monstrous secular machine that seems to be grinding forward to subdue every corner of the globe. In their eyes, we are a viper pit of sexual immorality. In some Saudi textbooks students are told not to befriend Jews or Christians because “emulation of the infidels leads to loving them, glorifying them and raising their status in the eyes of Muslims, and that is forbidden.”21
An environment lacking in basic needs (employment, food, shelter, etc.) can produce a dehumanized populace, but an environment with too much wealth and prosperity can also dehumanize. Americans appear zombielike because their raison d’etre appears to be the consumption of goods and pleasures, making us seem more attached to plastic surgery, reality television, and giant SUVs than to family, honor, and integrity. Some American films and novels have explored this critique of consumerist monstrosity, not from an outsider cultural perspective but from within it. Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 American Psycho and the 2000 film of the same name explore, among other things, the dehumanizing effects of a sick capitalist society. A privileged wealthy investment banker unravels into a vicious serial killer, but even more chilling is that he doesn’t seem to feel anything, as if his lifestyle of acquisition and hedonism has neutralized his humanity. Films like American Psycho and Donnie Darko (2001) explore the idea that American culture itself is the source of horror.22 From the perspective of some fundamentalists of the Muslim world, American individualism looks less like a point of pride and more like a form of selfish infantilism. To some extent, this view of Western pleasure zombies just rearticulates Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World version of our future.
The Spartans stand momentarily triumphant in front of a mountain of dead Persian “monsters” in the 2006 film 300 (Warner Bros.). Image courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.
Conversely, some Americans tend to stereotype Muslims as wild-eyed jihadi primitives who seek to destroy our modern and tolerant way of life.23 The mutual animosity is not new. In 1664 an illustrated pamphlet titled The Monstrous Tartar became very popular in England. It portrayed a frightening Muslim soldier, supposedly taken prisoner in Hungary. He is depicted as having a three-foot-long crane-like neck and is posed with bow and arrow, ready to oppose the good Christian cause. With only slightly more sophistication, we in the West have continued down to the present with this fabrication of monsters. In 2007 Hollywood released its fictionalized version of the battle of Thermopylae, titled 300 after the number of Spartan soldiers who stood their ground against thousands of invading Persians in 480 BCE. This famous battle, chronicled by Herodotus among others, stands as a symbolic tribute to the power of military training and efficiency (the Spartans) over sheer numbers and unskilled aggression (Xerxes’ Persian army). More recently, it has also stood as a symbol of the freedom-loving West defending itself against Eastern autocracy.
The visual representation of the Persians in 300 is straight from monster movies. The screen thunders with giant, snarling, twisted and deformed creatures, all bearing down on the buff Spartan heroes. These bad guys, according to the film, are the ancestors of modern Iran, and they drool and bark their way through the film with little resemblance to the human race. Dana Stevens opened her review of the film on Slate.com by saying, “If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total
war.”24 The Iranian scholar Touraj Daryaee wrote, “In a time when we hear the sirens of war over Iran (Persia), it is ominous that such a film as 300 is released for mass consumption. To depict Persians/Iranians as inarticulate monsters, raging towards the West, trying to rob its people of their basic values demeans the population of Iran and anesthetizes the American population to war in the Middle East.” Continuing his connection to contemporary policy, Daryaee sarcastically says, “This way Bush, Cheney, and other ‘compassionate’ conservatives can more easily rain their precision guided missiles down on the heads of my parents, family members and other Iranians, establish Abu Ghraib detention centers, and perhaps take revenge for the death of the 300 Spartans in antiquity and finally bring democracy, peace and a better way of life to the East.”25
Samuel Huntington suggests that the clash of civilizations is a relatively new break with older, more ideologically oriented animosities, such as communism versus capitalism. But I would argue that civilization xenophobia is only the latest skirmish in the ongoing ideological warfare. In fact, to call it the “latest” is to disregard the history of demoniza-tion. Even before we felt contempt for different races, Westerners felt contempt for barbarian cultures. In that sense, the new xenophobia is the old xenophobia. The strangers of the ancient world were not strange because of their skin color or their exotic geographic location. They were strange because their culture was alien, and they were feared and loathed accordingly.26
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Page 29