On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  24. See Anthony Chase, “Violent Reaction: What Do Teen Killers Have in Common?” In These Times, July 9, 2001.

  25. Martin Luther typifies a common Christian “monsterization” of Jews when says, “They are children of the Devil, condemned to the flames of hell…they have a God…he is called the Devil.” Quoted in Gold, Monsters and Madonnas, chapter 17.

  26. Ibid., chapter 15.

  27. Ibid., epilogue.

  28. Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred (Norton, 1993), chapter 1, section 2.

  29. Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years, chapter 2.

  30. Strictly speaking, the unemotional monster is older than the twentieth century. It goes back at least to the accusations by Romantics, some of which we’ve looked at, against the cold clinical rationalists of the Enlightenment. But the earlier discussion was largely academic, artistic, and ideological, not usually applied to real criminology issues or cases. See Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1846 short story “The Birthmark” for a fictional version of a scientist who has lost his emotional core in the pursuit of abstraction.

  31. Erle Stanley Gardner, introduction in Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years.

  32. Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years, chapter 1.

  33. One cannot be entirely sure whether Leopold has accurately reported the real meaning of his famous quip. It is possible that he was seeking to revise his own history in a charitable way. Ibid., chapter 2.

  34. Personal communication with Michael Harvey. Harvey’s novel The Chicago Way (Knopf, 2007) is based on his real life experiences with John Wayne Gacy. Harvey was also the creator and executive producer of the television documentary series Cold Case Files. He explained to me that Gacy and other such murderers have an intense need to dominate others:

  It’s all about power and control. Power and control over the victims. Power and control over the police investigating the crimes. Power and control over the media covering the crimes. All of it feeds the serial killer’s massive ego, makes him feel like he is the center of attention, and operates almost as an aphrodisiac for the killer. Many serial killers will go even further, attempting to exert control over their victims even after death. Killers will keep bodies close by as “trophies,” so they can revisit their victims and relive the crimes. Yes, power and control. The stuff of serial killer fantasy.

  35. See Hare’s now classic book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths among Us (Guilford Press, 1999), but also his more recent book, coauthored with Paul Babiak, Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (Regan Books, 2006) for an interesting discussion of corporate psychopaths. Now Hare only needs to write an additional volume on academic psychopaths.

  36. Quoted in an interview with Kate Hilpern, “Office Hours, Beware: Danger at Work,” The Guardian, September 27, 2004.

  37. Quoted in Rose, “Crime.”

  38. Interview with Dick, by John Boonstra, in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine 2, no. 3 (June 1982): 47–52.

  39. Is there some additional property that entities must possess if they are to be considered persons? The philosophical strategy of Blade Runner is to slowly build up progressive layers of biological traits on originally inanimate objects (the replicants). And the question is tacitly asked at each stage: Do we have a “person” yet? How about if we add memories? How about if we add learning skills? And so on.

  40. One of the crucial traits that Blade Runner adds to the replicants is imagination, which seems crucial to empathy. When Darwin wrote The Descent of Man (1872), he had to argue vehemently that nonhuman animals possess imagination. Prior to Darwin, the idea of animal imagination was both rare (because Descartes had persuaded many that animals had no minds) and heretical (for it seemed to imply some unholy kinship between man and animal). Darwin realized that this trait was a serious hurdle, pronouncing, “The Imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man. By this faculty he unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results” (chapter 3). But even so high a faculty as imagination, Darwin argued, could be found in animals, and the place to look for it was the dream. Dreaming is the involuntary art of poetry (chapter 3). If animals can dream, then they are “uniting former images and ideas” and “creating brilliant and novel results”: they are imagining. Not unrelated is the original title of Blade Runner, Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The question posed here is whether a computer could ever dream at all.

  41. The vaguely Christian symbolism is reinforced by Roy’s receiving, just prior to the redemption, a nail through his hand.

  42. Of course, Descartes would object that you still do not have certainty because the test itself must be read by the senses, and we know how fallible the senses can be.

  43. See Matt Crenson, “What Makes a Sexual Predator?” Associated Press, September 6, 2005.

  44. In Anger, Madness and the Daimonic, Stephen Diamond laments that “the most ascendant and widely accepted explanation for psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (manic depressive illness) is the biochemical model, which presumes that there is an inherited, biochemical abnormality in certain people predisposing them to psychosis” (chapter 5).

  45. I will simply state my official embrace of causal pluralism and move on to some specific experimental findings. By detailing a couple of brain-based case studies, I am not renouncing or downplaying the spiritual and existential dimensions of mental disorders—dimensions that, I think, can be correlated with rather than reduced to physiochemical events. I tend to agree in principle with George Engel’s pluralistic biopsychosocial model of psychiatry, although its critics have pointed out that it lacks implementable details for a strong research program. See Engel’s “The Need for a New Medical Model,” Science 196 (1977).

  46. My discussion of Dr. Kiehl’s research is based on Crenson, “What Makes a Sexual Predator?”

  47. Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing (Times Books, 2002), chapter 10.

  48. Information on Dr. Gray’s research is taken from Paul Rowland, “Brain Biology of Psychopaths ‘Lack Capacity to Interpret Fear,’ ” The Western Mail, December 5, 2006.

  49. The lack of empathy that one finds in parts of the autistic spectrum, such as in Asperger’s syndrome, has led to some highly speculative questions about neurological similarities with psychopaths. In “Does the Autistic Child Have a ‘Theory of Mind’?” Cognition 21 (1985), psychologists Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie, and Uta Frith show empirical evidence that autistics have a much harder time than other mentally challenged subjects in their ability to impute beliefs to other people. Suffice it to say that psychopaths are a species unto themselves, and most autistics are entirely humane, loving, and gentle.

  50. Information about Dr. Ralph Adolphs’s research is drawn from his article “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgments,” Nature 446 (April 2007).

  51. Linda Mealey, “The Sociobiology of Sociopathy: An Integrated Evolutionary Model,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995).

  52. Personal communication with Michael Harvey. He went on to say, “There are, of course, many other factors that play into the dynamics here, and those factors will vary greatly from case to case. I just mean to point out that this type of childhood abuse appears to be a common denominator and, perhaps, sets off a chain reaction in certain individuals that leads them to engage in psychopathic behavior as an adult.”

  53. Quoted in Diamond, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic, chapter 5. My own thinking on this issue is strongly indebted to Dr. Diamond, who continues throughout his book to develop Jung’s point further. In our haste to eliminate any egregious emotions, we have pursued a medical model of tranquilization rather than finding other, potentially healthy outlets for madness.

  54. Joseph Edward Duncan III described his own struggle with demons on his Internet blog. In April 2005 Duncan wrote, “It is a battle between me and my demons.” He continued, “I’m afraid, very afraid. If they win then a lot of people will b
e badly hurt.” Quoted in Crenson, “What Makes a Sexual Predator?” A month later Duncan broke into an Idaho family home and tied up the mother, her boyfriend, and the eldest boy. He hammered the three victims to death, then kidnapped the eight-year-old daughter, Shasta, and the nine-year-old boy, Dylan, repeatedly raping and molesting them for six weeks. Eventually Duncan murdered Dylan. Before he committed these horrific acts, Duncan had already established a pattern of sexual predatory behavior. He did time for raping a young boy at gunpoint and was also arrested in 2004 for groping a six-year-old. He appears to be linked to an earlier unsolved homicide in California as well. He was not just a regular guy who had an isolated bad day. Nor does it appear that he made any normal kind of freewill choice to adopt a new lifestyle of killing people and raping children.

  Most would agree that Joseph Edward Duncan III is a monster, in the sense that he has abdicated his own humanity. His deeds are unforgivable. It seems extremely doubtful that any causal story could be produced (no matter how accurate) that would explain Duncan’s actions to most reasonable people. If we could show that Lucifer himself was inside Duncan’s heart, or a virus had eaten part of his brain, or a “bludgeoning gene” had been discovered, or he had grown up in a Skinner box…it would hardly matter. And the idea that Duncan himself knows why he did it also seems very hard to believe.

  55. Social psychologists have long recognized a double standard when judging bad behavior. When I commit some awful deed I am apt to attribute my actions to the stresses of a difficult situation, not my character. But if I observe similar bad behavior in another I am apt to ascribe the deviance to the person’s character; I tend to see it as a personality trait rather than a situational response. Most people, Brodsky notwithstanding, have the same inconsistent tendency.

  56. Of course, one of the most odious characters of recent political history is Saddam Hussein. Along with other genocidal leaders, such as Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin, Saddam has been psychoanalyzed from afar by many scholars. Whichever psychopathological label eventually sticks to his name, it’s pretty clear that he had a very difficult childhood. His peasant father died shortly after his birth and his mother left him with relatives for many years, finally returning with a stepfather who abused and humiliated him. By all accounts he had a rather lonely childhood and did not seem to keep up with his peers; he could not read or write until he was ten years old. His deprivations seem to have paved the road to later heartlessness. A malignant heart seems to have developed in the context of political justifications and rationalizations. Saddam seems to fit the diagnosis of malignant narcissist (narcissistic personality disorder) in the sense that he had little empathy for others and a grandiose sense of his own importance. The psychologist Erwin Parson claimed that Saddam had a “Nebuchadnezzar imperial complex”; he even had himself photographed in the style of the ancient Babylonian king. Peter Beaumont, “From Tikrit Boy to Butcher of Bagdad,” The Observer, December 31, 2006, asks:

  At the end, what can we say about Saddam? That he was a monster? A madman? A malignant narcissist? All of these labels and more have been applied. In the run up to the second Gulf War, the author and columnist Thomas Friedman framed the paradox of Saddam in a different and more subtle way, asking whether Iraq was the way it was because of Saddam? Or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq? In reality there are no monsters, only men. And it was as a man Saddam went to the gallows, not as a cipher. Those who called him a “madman”—as so many did—were lazy. He was too complex and contradictory a figure for that, as those who tried to profile him discovered. But if there are identifiable hallmarks of narcissistic personality disorder, then Saddam had them times over.

  CHAPTER 14

  1. Quotations are from Elaine Marshall, “Crane’s ‘the Monster’ Seen in Light of Robert Lewis’s Lynching,” Nineteenth Century Literature 51, no. 2 (1996). Marshall argues convincingly that Crane took some imaginative inspiration for his Henry Johnson character from his brother William’s firsthand account of Robert Lewis.

  2. Gary Will, “The Dramaturgy of Death,” New York Review of Books 48, no. 10 (2001).

  3. Quotations are taken from Elaine Marshall’s article “Crane’s ‘the Monster’ Seen in Light of Robert Lewis’s Lynching,” Nineteenth Century Literature 51, no. 2 (1996).

  4. Bureau of Justice, Correctional Populations in the United States, 1996 report, and Bureau of Census, quoted on the Human Rights Watch Web site, www.hrw.org. In the 1990s the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that one in every three black men in their twenties was either in prison, in jail, or on parole or probation. See Sasha Abramsky, American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment (Beacon Press, 2007), introduction.

  5. Debra Higgs Strickland, “Monsters and Christian Enemies,” History Today, February 2000.

  6. James Aho, This Thing of Darkness (University of Washington Press, 1994), chapter 6, “Who Shall Be the Enemy.”

  7. Mike Prysner, video testimony, Iraq Veterans against the War Web site, http://ivaw.org/.

  8. Faces of the Enemy, a film by Bill Jersey and Jeffrey Friedman, a Quest Production, 1987, based on the book by Sam Keen.

  9. Edward Said, Orientalism (Random House, 1978).

  10. Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (Pantheon, 1975).

  11. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Dover Publications, 1959), vol. 1, chapter 33.

  12. Quoted in Daniel Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Henry Holt, 1948).

  13. Edward Drinker Cope, “The Developmental Significance of Human Physiognomy,” American Naturalist 17 (1883).

  14. Contrary to Chomsky and Said, the philosopher John Searle recognized the potential racism contained within Cartesian rationalism. He points out, “Once you believe that there are innate human mental structures it is only a short step to argue that the innate mental structures differ from one race to another.” This “short step” was in fact taken by Nazi racial theorists, and I suspect this step was facilitated by the internalist metaphors (e.g., noumenon, will) that pervade the intellectual tradition from Kant through Nietzsche. John Searle, “The Rules of the Language Game,” Times Literary Supplement, September 10, 1976.

  15. George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (Schocken Books, 1981).

  16. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim (Houghton Mifflin, 1971).

  17. I’m aware that adaptationist evolutionary explanations of instincts may share some of the same questionable assumptions of the more conscious explanations. One such assumption may be that a trait or behavior exists because it is useful. There is a teleological structure that operates in most adaptationist explanations of trait survival, but I don’t think it’s circular, nor do I think it falls prey to the charge of Panglossian optimism.

  18. Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape (Riverhead Books, 2005), chapter 4.

  19. See Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993), and his more developed argument in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1998). Things have changed so radically in the decade or so after Huntington forwarded his thesis that much of his specific writing about China and the Middle East is rendered out of date. But the general idea of a clash of civilizations has perhaps grown and flourished in the nonacademic popular culture.

  20. One of the most famous Muslim creators of the American caricature was the Egyptian scholar and Muslim Brotherhood apologist Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966). Qutb’s writings, including “The America I Have Seen,” have become especially inspirational for terrorist groups like Al-Qaida. Qutb’s anxiety about American debauchery, especially the sexually aggressive American woman, is almost humorous now, because he drew his conclusions from attending a chaste-sounding 1949 Colorado State College dance. “The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,” Qutb laments, “the dancehall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.
” His anxiety about licentious sexuality was only a piece of a larger-scale cultural disgust, an abhorrence that has intensified in the Islamism of recent years. See Sayyid Qutb, “The America I Have Seen,” in America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature, edited by Kamal Abdel-Malek (Palgrave, 2000).

  21. See Brian Whitaker, “Saudi Textbooks ‘Demonize West,’ ” The Guardian, July 14, 2004.

  22. See Ruth Goldberg, “ ‘In the Church of the Poison Mind’: Adapting the Metaphor of Psychopathology to Look Back at the Mad, Monstrous 80s,” in Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutations in the Horror Film, edited by Richard J. Hand and Jay McRoy (Manchester University Press, 2007).

  23. Of course, we in the United States also have strongly hierarchic fundamentalist Christian traditions. We, too, have traditions that are accommodating modern ism with varying degrees of success. And our tribal and hierarchic sects of the major monotheisms make uneasy company in the egalitarian American democracy. The ostensibly secular playing field of American public life (won by the Disestablishment Clause) thinly veils our private spiritual lives. These private inner lives, whether they are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, pulse with autocratic deities and submissive devotees, but they are necessarily stunted in the public context of egalitarian tolerance.