On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  24. Dana Steven, “A Movie Only a Spartan Could Love,” Slate.com, March 8, 2007.

  25. Touraj Daryaee, “Go Tell the Spartans,” Iranian.com, March 14, 2007.

  26. The work of Frank M. Snowden Jr., for example Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Harvard University Press, 1983), offers compelling evidence that ancient Mediterranean cultures were not prejudiced about skin color. Instead, the ancients organized their xenophobia around cultural prejudices against language, art, and religion.

  27. Perhaps it’s appropriate to acknowledge an even earlier defining moment of this structuralism, namely, Marx’s theory that the structures of capitalist political economy “alienate” the worker and transform him into a kind of zombie. See Marx’s Paris manuscripts in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto (Prometheus Books, 1988).

  28. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics, 2006), epilogue.

  29. See Milgram’s Obedience to Authority.

  30. Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007).

  31. Unfortunately for Zimbardo’s thesis, there is some evidence that some of the U.S. soldiers were in fact bad apples. Specialist Charles Graner, who was sentenced to ten years in prison, has a checkered past, with allegations of domestic abuse and even inmate abuse, when he worked (before Abu Ghraib) as a corrections officer in Greene County, Pennsylvania.

  32. Philip Zimbardo, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: A Lesson in the Power of Situation,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 30, 2007.

  33. Gardner, introduction to Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years.

  34. Quoted in James Dobson, Fatal Addiction: Pornography and Sexual Violence, video documentary of the Bundy interview, available from Dobson’s conservative nonprofit Focus on the Family.

  35. Mark Ames trolls the Web for disgruntled former NIU students complaining about the “shittiest,” “ugliest,” even the “windiest” campus they’ve, like, ever seen. From this dubious method of data collection he concludes that DeKalb and NIU represent “a very familiar, flat sort of American Hell,” a Middle American place so dreadful that anybody who lives there should be on psychiatric medication: “Indeed, someone who wouldn’t turn to antidepressants would, in my opinion, be the sick one.” He suggests that the real villain in the massacre was not Kazmierczak, but the oppressively dull and mediocre NIU campus and community. Sadly, this kind of extreme structural theory of monsters can be found everywhere in our contemporary discourse. Ames’s argument strikes me as so implausible that I’ll offer only the following brief response. First, disgruntled students can be found decrying the evils of their school in every city and rural town in America. Nothing interesting about mass murderers can be concluded, as far as I can tell, from students grousing about their campus and faculty. The leap in logic here is deplorable. Second, after living amid real poverty in the developing world (as I did in Cambodia), one finds such pretended despair (common among such railers against the system) truly pusillanimous. Ames describes Kazmierczak’s home town of Elk Grove, Illinois, which is not far from the odious DeKalb, as a terrifying place of white people, businesses, highways, “and, yes, suburban tract homes.” My goodness, one wonders why everybody from such dreadful places isn’t killing their neighbors with automatic weaponry. Finally, I myself attended NIU for four years of undergraduate study and two years of graduate work, and, though it was clearly no Paris, I rarely if ever felt the desire to buy some guns and shoot my classmates. As far as I can tell, none of the other hundreds of thousands of NIU graduates who endured the same “bleak” and of course windy campus ever wrestled much with murderous impulses.

  36. Eldridge Cleaver, “On Becoming,” in Soul on Ice (McGraw Hill, 1968).

  37. One simple counterargument will sufficiently unmask the hypocrisy and insincerity of Cleaver’s explanation for his raping women. He claimed that his goal in raping white women was a form of vengeance because of the historical ill treatment of black women. If this is true, then one wonders why he started out his rape agenda by “practicing on black girls in the ghetto.” He admits in Soul on Ice that raping black girls would be good “training” to get ready for “The Ogre.” Cleaver’s incoherent and hypocritical logic makes it clear that some redistributions of criminal culpability, from individual to society, are nothing more than convenient subterfuges.

  38. Quoted in Rose, “Crime.”

  39. Quotes and information from Xavier McElrath-Bey are taken from his presentation in my spring 2008 course “Doing Time in America: The Prison System” at Columbia College, and from his autobiographical sketch in Gordon Mclean’s Too Young to Die (Tyndale House, 1998). In addition to Xavier, I am also indebted to my coteachers, Professors Garnett Kilberg-Cohen and Sara Livingston.

  40. This impersonal aspect of the criminal justice system, among other things, has led Xavier to work with BARJ, the nationwide movement for Balanced and Restorative Justice, which attempts to introduce community justice mechanisms that hold of fenders, instead of the abstract “state,” directly accountable to their victims. One of the goals of this movement is to humanize criminal justice by contextualizing it in the real lives of those directly effected. BARJ sees the current paradigm as alienating and unhelpful for both victims and offenders.

  41. When he was sentenced as an adult and sent to prison for murder, he continued the gang-banger lifestyle inside the even more primitive “jungle atmosphere” of the penitentiary. “At first,” Xavier explained, “I blamed the system. I read Marx and I became a communist in prison. I read Nietzsche too, and I came to see myself and my people as ‘victims.’ ” Society was to blame. Gang life was an alternative society, one where he and other disenfranchised men could hold power. Later, after long stretches of what he called “existential isolation” and reflection, Xavier took a more balanced approach and accepted personal responsibility for his actions.

  42. According to this view, monsters from the ghetto are brutal and actively aggressive, but the corrupt legal and political systems that overcrowd prisons and build local economies on incarceration are just passive-aggressive, institutional versions of equally dehumanizing tendencies. Michel Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish suggests that modern forms of state-controlled surveillance and psychological manipulation by more “humane” methods (such as the panopticon) only appear to be less insidious than the corporeal punishments of pre-Enlightenment Europe. Suffice it to say that Foucault and his devotees are strong proponents of the structural theory (or social constructivism) of deviance. There are no real monsters except those defined so by the powerful.

  43. See Raymond Ibrahim, ed., Al-Qaida Reader (Broadway, 2007).

  44. See Reza Aslan, “Why Do They Hate Us?” Slate.com, August 6, 2007.

  45. Alan Krueger, “What Makes a Terrorist?” The American: A Magazine of Ideas, December 2007, at American.com. Alberto Abadie, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, has argued that the level of political freedom, not poverty, explains terrorism. He told the Harvard Gazette, “In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it’s not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin.” Abadie argues that it is areas with intermediate levels of political freedom that experience the most terrorism. Both societies with high levels of political freedom and authoritarian regimes have quite low levels of terrorism. “Tight control and repressive practices keep terrorist activities in check, while nations making the transition to more open, democratic governments may be politically unstable, which makes them more vulnerable.” Quoted in Alvin Powell, “Freedom Squelches Terrorist Violence,” Harvard Gazette, November 4, 2004.

  46. Marc Sageman,
Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), chapter 3.

  47. Of course, a higher degree of education in the terrorist population begs the question about what sort of education. If the higher levels of study are just in the Qur’an, Sharia, and Hadith exegesis, then one cannot conclude much about the traditional liberalizing effects of learning. If, however, the higher education is more than indoctrination, then Krueger’s findings may be the most compelling evidence that Muslim outrage is not ideological at all, but an informed sense of political injustice. This would not necessarily negate the structural explanation of terrorism, but only reorient it away from religious and economic motivations and toward nationalist ones.

  48. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (Free Press, 2007).

  49. From an audiotape, attributed to bin Laden, released in March 2008, quoted in Ian Fisher, “Vatican Dismissed bin Laden Accusation of ‘Crusade,’ ” New York Times, March 21, 2008.

  In April 2007 a small publishing house in Malatya, Turkey, was attacked, apparently because it distributed Bibles. Three employees, a German and two Turks, were found with their hands and legs bound and their throats slit. Five suspects were arrested, each of whom carried a letter that said, “We five are brothers. We are going to our deaths.” This sort of violence, which admittedly is decentralized, gives credence to the idea that at least some of the terrorism is religiously or ideologically grounded.

  50. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Norton, 2004), chapter 1.

  51. See Martin Amis’s three-part essay “The Age of Horrorism,” The Guardian, September 2006, and Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (Hachette, 2007) for an extended critique of religion as a species of insanity. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography Infidel includes an extended critique of Islam as backward and dehumanizing.

  52. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin, 2007), chapter 1.

  53. Religion, according to these critics, is only one of the monstrosities. Other dehumanizing ideologies include communism, democracy, patriarchy, feminism, and scientism. Joseph Stalin, referring to his own damaging revolutionary policies, is reputed to have shrugged, “If you want to make an omelette, you’ll have to break some eggs.” Isaiah Berlin damns all such dehumanizing idealism and reminds us that the twentieth century has been the age of disastrous “final solutions.” Utopian thinking, according to Berlin, is divorced from the reality of human lives; it loses the trees for the forest. He characterizes the ideologist as someone whose good intentions (e.g., the future liberation of all mankind) actually blind him to the pain and suffering he is causing in the here and now. “To make such an omelette,” Berlin says, “there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken—that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao, for all I know of Pol Pot.” Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Vintage Books, 1992).

  54. Donna Haraway, one of the most influential postmodern monster theorists, attempts to use the metaphor of the cyborg as a liberating and empowering symbol for feminists. In previous decades the cyborg, a hybrid creature, part artificial and part natural, was a disturbing disruption of normality, but now that same disruption is turned into a virtue. Haraway argues that a cyborg, a pastiche creature without essentialist defining parameters, is a kind of model for contemporary women who wish to claim solidarity and political power in a disorderly world that lacks traditional boundaries such as “human nature.” For Haraway and other postmoderns, monsters are metaphors of destabilization, and the goal of such subversion is to weaken the patriarchy and strengthen the repressed and excluded. See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), especially the “Cyborg Manifesto” in chapter 8.

  55. The intellectual heirs of Foucault, focused on “othering discourses,” are more interested in how some people are made to appear to be monsters. Appearance (representation) is of paramount interest, not reality (since for them no reality “really” exists outside of these power discourses).

  56. I think it is entirely possible to accept the idea that monsters resist classification and inhabit the terra incognita without succumbing to the radical metaphysics of postmodern skepticism. The anomalies and exceptions that comprise the monstrous are not unraveling the center, as postmodernists predicted. The monsters remain, even by definition, outsiders. They do not actually or symbolically overthrow the rational.

  My objection to postmodern relativism is that it suffers from a severe case of melodrama. Yes, meanings are partially constructed by society, but that doesn’t mean there is no accessible reality. When the semiological linguists noticed that words cannot be connected easily to their referents (i.e., nothing essential about the word dog picks out the four-footed mammal barking outside), they melodramatically inferred that all language (and thought) lacks rational foundation, and meaning is just the free play of socially manipulated but ultimately arbitrary signs. This assumption serves as the basis of most postmodern work, but it strikes me as inductively fallacious, empirically false, and strangely provincial (narrowly textual) in its view of human knowledge. The idea that language and thought are sloppy and imprecise is obvious to anyone who has used them and does not indicate a radical relativism of all language, especially in light of the astounding successes of human communication. The assumptions of postmodernism seem slightly ridiculous as soon as we leave the world of literary theory and enter the world of medicine or engineering or even automotive repair. For two quite different but compelling discussions of the relationship between Darwinian theory and postmodernism, see Colin Nazhone Milburn, “Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida,” MLN 118, no. 3 (2003), and Brian Boyd, “Getting It All Wrong,” American Scholar (Autumn 2006).

  57. The deconstructionist David Gunkel announces, “Monsters signify. And what they signify is precisely the deterioration and demise of philosophical demonstration in general.” For Gunkel, rationality, and its servants, have been a controlling force. See his deconstruction of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature in “Scary Monsters: Hegel and the Nature of the Monstrous,” International Studies in Philosophy 29, no. 2 (1997).

  58. The one domain where I think postmodernism has had fruitful effect is aesthetics. To keep the analytical thread of my book on monstrous creatures and men, I have had to forgo an interesting discussion about the monster idea in the arts. Without getting in too deeply, it is worth pointing out that most Western narratives have had the structural arc of the Aristotelian curve. That is to say, stories, according to Aristotle’s Poetics, should have internal cohesion, with beginnings, antecedents and consequential actions, climaxes, resolutions, and endings. Or consider Plato’s Phaedrus, the second half of which is entirely devoted to showing how a good story should be like a healthy organism, all parts well formed, essential, and functionally connected to each other. Postmodernism, on the other hand, has nicely celebrated the monstrous artwork: deformed stories without teleological justification. Surrealism began the job, it seems, and postmodernism has continued the tradition of mutilated narratives and hybridized stories. Like teratological offspring, novels and films have placed beginnings in the middle and endings at beginnings and generally twisted around character and plot mechanisms until something quite new emerges. Film and literature have celebrated monstrous turns in their storytelling: non sequiturs, inessential episodes, violations of space and time, and so on. One thinks here of the work of writers like Jorge Borges, Italo Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon, or the films of David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and perhaps Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

  59. See Noor Khan, “Attackers Behead Afghan Teacher for Education of Girls,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 5, 2006.

  CHAPTER 15

  1. Akira Kurosawa gives high praise to Honda Inoshiro, the director of Godzilla. The two filmmakers worked together on many films, including Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985). See “A Long Story: part I,” in Akira Kuros
awa: Something Like an Autobiography (Vintage Books, 1983).

  2. In “Where Wonders Await Us” Tim Flannery gives us a shocking and depressing iteration of waste that we’ve dumped into the deep hadal zone. During every war hundreds (even thousands) of vessels and their toxic fuel and munitions sink to the bottom, but even during peacetime the pollution is staggering. Between 1971 and 1990 an average of one ship was lost every two days, and up until the 1970s it was common for countries to dump their chemical weapons. “Britain alone,” Flannery explains, “has dumped 137,000 tons of unwanted chemical weapons at sea, and some of the chemicals still remain in solid form on the bottom.” Moreover, shortly after World War II radioactive waste began to be dumped, and between then and 1993 (when the practice was banned) 142,000 tons had been dumped into the North Atlantic. The mutational results of this kind of pollution are still unclear, but worrisome trends can already be seen. The liver glands of some shrimp species contain a million times the level of polonium-210 than naturally occurs in seawater. Industrial waste causes sex changes in mollusks, and mercury poisoning is so prevalent that most pregnant women already know they should not eat fish. The damaging chemicals that we previously thought would just stay quietly on the bottom of the ocean will in fact come back to haunt us in the food chain.