On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Some more recent accusations of monstrous societies include the following well-known variations: Godless communism creates nihilistic, immoral monsters; rabid capitalism and consumerism create hedonistic zombies (Karl Marx actually referred to capitalism as a “vampire” sucking the blood of the labor class); theocracy creates uncritical fanatical zealots. We know these are monstrous societies, the logic goes, because they produce monstrous results: genocide, terrorism, and torture.

  What’s seemingly new, conceptually speaking, is that after the heyday of internal Freudian aggression theory, the pendulum has swung and we now have radical social constructionism—in plain English, extreme nurture over nature. Systems are evil, not people. It is society or ideology that churns out monsters; the blame is diffused to the larger social system.27 This view fits nicely with liberal postmodern ideas about structural rather than individual responsibility, but it also sits well with neoconservative arguments that we must alter the cultures of theocracies and monarchies everywhere in order to create freer, happier, decidedly nonmonstrous individuals at home and abroad. We live in a time when it is reasonable to think of monsters as socially conditioned or constructed.

  PATHOLOGICAL SOCIETIES

  In the 1960s Hannah Arendt articulated a new kind of monster. In Eich-mann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil she gives us a picture of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust, as a calm, almost robotic psychopath. Eichmann was not so much an anti-Semite as an unfeeling, detached career man looking for the most expeditious path to professional success. He lacked empathy, just like the psychopaths I discussed in chapter 13. Arendt points out that “it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster,” but “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”28

  Thinking about Arendt’s description of Eichmann, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram framed the notorious Nazi within his overall theory of situational evil. Most people, Milgram argued, would do heinous immoral acts if certain social expectations were placed on them. Recall from the introduction that Milgram asked test subjects to administer painful electrical shocks to other subjects. He was surprised to find how many subjects were willing to follow orders no matter what the cost in human suffering. Milgram concluded that people become torturers and abusers when they are inside specific dehumanizing social frameworks. Individual monsters are extensions of monstrous institutional systems.29

  Earlier ages recognized the unhealthy group dynamic of mobs. In the seventeenth century Thomas Browne saw large crowds as enemies of reason, virtue, and religion, “a monstrosity more prodigious than the hydra.” In the twentieth century theorists expanded this image to include schools, prisons, the military, corporations, churches, and other potentially corrupting organizations. The psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a well-known prison experiment at Stanford University in 1971 using college students to role-play guards and inmates. Even though the assignment of specific roles was entirely random and reflected no culpability on the part of the “inmates,” the experiment revealed a very rapid descent into sadistic abuse by the “guards.” Eventually the experiment had to be halted, but not before it demonstrated to Zimbardo that a kind of overwhelming power exists in certain situations, a power that can sweep away an individual’s better judgment.

  Dr. Zimbardo updated his original findings in a recent book titled The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, applying his situational theory to the notorious case of torture in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.30 The fact that seemingly normal American soldiers engaged in torture and degradation techniques on Iraqi detainees offers more evidence, Zimbardo thinks, for his view that abuse and aggression are not the results of inner character flaws. The torture at Abu Ghraib was not, as the Bush administration maintained, a result of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. It was instead, according to Zimbardo, the result of a “bad barrel” corrupting any apples put into it.31 It was an institution that pressured soldiers to gather intelligence by any means necessary, and this “end justifies the means” philosophy gave interrogators carte blanche in their treatment of the detainees.

  Unlike the Freudian view of monstrous behavior, which focused on the deformities of the individual’s inner psyche, the new paradigm sees a “Lucifer effect” in the external structures of social interaction. Zimbardo writes, “Situational forces can work to transform even some of the best of us into Mr. Hyde monsters, without the benefit of Dr. Jekyll’s chemical elixir. We must be more aware of how situational variables can influence our behavior.”32 This viewpoint of criminality and deviance was only starting to show itself in the days of the Leopold and Loeb murder, when Erle Stanley Gardner said “society itself was partly responsible” and “we are only beginning to realize that the sole cause does not lie entirely with the juvenile.”33 Now this societal view (some might call it a structural view) has become standard operating procedure. In fact, so common is this new view of monsters that many contemporary deviants go straight to it when explaining their own depravity.

  Ted Bundy killed more than thirty people in the late 1970s, although some (including Bundy himself) put the figure much higher. He also engaged in sexual assault and necrophilia. Hours before he was executed in 1989, Bundy gave a final interview to the evangelical leader James Dobson in which he blamed pornography for leading him astray. Bundy went so far as to say that every other ne’er-do-well he had met in prison during his ten-year stretch had also been inspired to evil by pornography and violence in the media: “Those of us who have been so much influenced by violence in the media—in particular, pornographic violence—aren’t some kind of inherent monsters. We are your sons, and we are your husbands. We grew up in regular families.”34

  In addition to conservative structural views about dehumanizing media and popular culture, liberals have taken up structural views of their own, sometimes to ridiculous effect. Recall the Northern Illinois University shooter Steven Kazmierczak, who killed five others and himself and also injured eighteen in a lecture hall. Days after it happened, Mark Ames, the author of the book Going Postal, published an essay on the lefty online syndication service Alternet titled “NIU: Was the Killer Crazy, or the Campus Hopeless?” The title alone represents a question about heinous crime that would not, maybe could not have been asked a few decades ago.35

  Silly, too, but telling, is the extreme structuralism to which Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) appealed when trying to explain his own career as a serial rapist. Cleaver is well known as an influential member of the Black Panthers (lesser known is his volte-face as a Reagan Republican in the 1980s), but before all that he was in prison for rape. In the mid-1960s he ingested enough Marxism while in jail on drug possession to bend its explanatory framework into service for other criminal transgressions. He saw himself as a victim. He and other criminals were in fact responding to a broken social system of institutional racism. Society, not the criminal, was the monster, according to Cleaver. Beyond just the degradations of the class struggle, the most insidious threat, for Cleaver, was the socially constructed set of ideals and values in our culture. Above all other such sinfully engineered ideals was “The Ogre”: “I discovered, with alarm, that The Ogre possessed a tremendous and dreadful power over me, and I didn’t understand this power or why I was at its mercy. I tried to repudiate The Ogre, root it out of my heart as I had done God, Constitution, principles, morals, and values—but The Ogre had its claws buried in the core of my being and refused to let go. I fought frantically to be free, but The Ogre only mocked me and sank its claws deeper into my soul.”36 This horrible monster, according to Cleaver, was “the white woman.” In his poem “To a White Girl” he expressed his mixed emotions, saying that he both loved and hated the “white witch” and saw her as a “symbol of the rope and hanging tree.” In response to this torment Cleaver became a rapist as “an insu
rrectionary act.” By raping white women, he felt he was getting revenge for the ways that black women had been defiled by white men during the slavery era. Cleaver thus desperately tried to dress up his deviance in the clothes of righteous indignation and political revolution.37

  Setting aside these more extreme and unconvincing applications of the structural theory of monsters, we must concede the wisdom in more balanced approaches to the idea of monstrous societies. One cannot deny that certain social environments can bring out the worst in people.

  MONSTERS FROM THE OPPRESSED CLASSES

  The ghetto is often characterized as a Darwinian jungle of kill or be killed. Indeed, certain impoverished pockets in Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere have barbaric murder rates. In July 2007 then senator Barack Obama pointed out that nearly three dozen Chicago kids had been murdered so far that year, and that figure was higher than the casualty numbers of Illinois soldiers serving in Iraq during the same time.

  Many argue that violence becomes a way of life. If you cannot adopt the violent lifestyle, you will be victimized by it. A violent criminal in Franklin, a high-security prison, said, “Normal to me is the jungle. They talk about callousness and lack of empathy, but, please, what the fuck is empathy? Where I come from, if I knock you down, you stay down. It’s not normal to come up and kill you stone dead because I want your money, but that is normality for me. At the end of the day, all of us sitting here are monsters, whether we’re armed robbers, child molesters, or killers—we’re monsters.”38

  Xavier McElrath-Bey, a Chicago native who grew up in the tough “Back of the Yards” neighborhood, an area originally made famous by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, prefers to allude to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies when he describes his hood. He joined a gang when he was only eleven years old, and by the time he was thirteen he had been arrested nineteen times.39 When I met Xavier he had been out of prison for a few years, released after serving thirteen years of a sentence for murder. After serving almost half his life in prison and earning a college degree there, he had unique insights into contemporary criminality. “I don’t believe there are bad kids,” Xavier said, “just bad socialization.” When kids become teenagers, he explained, their norms and values naturally shift from those of their parents and family to those of their peer group. In his violent neighborhood, that meant becoming a gang member. “Gang life gave me a sense of purpose and meaning,” he said. The hood is a volatile and exciting place, where a young man can forge strong social ties and rise through the ranks of hierarchy and respect. The cost is a life of violence and paranoia, but it seems worth the price when you are young and successful in the lifestyle. Xavier said that he didn’t really think much about the people he was hurting, because whenever he was caught he never had to face his victims. In all his court proceedings, he heard only about “the people” or “the state” versus Xavier; he felt that he was simply breaking an impersonal law upheld by an impersonal system and an antagonistic police force.40 Just as psychopaths lack empathy for others, here we see some of the consequences of systems that lack empathy or prevent empathic responses.41

  Desperate environments create desperate measures. Thug life looks monstrous by the standards of polite society, but it was hatched and nursed in a world where it has distinct advantages. According to this view, social injustice and oppression create a violent aggressive criminal culture as a response.42 The basic logic of this view can be seen in a different context when we consider suicide bombers. The point here is not to draw a facile comparison between ghetto criminality and suicide bombers, for they are different sorts of characters. But in today’s monsterology, they are both considered major threats to stability and they are both subjected to structural explanations. The claim that suicide terrorists are just evil monsters who freely choose to murder innocent people is alive and well. But the common belief today is that structural stresses (economic, political, ideological) create monstrously deviant individuals. How true, or perhaps more important, how useful is such a belief?

  A study of the writings and pronouncements in the Al-Qaida Reader reveals no unified complaint against the United States, no specific charge that rallies and justifies suicide bomber retaliations.43 Instead one finds a litany of localized grievances and a random body of complaints against U.S. domestic and international policy, mostly lifted from our own internal media critiques. Osama bin Laden, for example, surprisingly takes an angry interest in the refusal by the United States to sign the Kyoto agreement addressing the environmental implications of global warming, and even objects to U.S. campaign-finance laws that unfairly advantage the wealthy.44 Reza Aslan, a scholar of Islam, interprets the pastiche nature of these grievances as evidence of a general Al-Qaida strategy to invent a clash of civilizations, an invention that George W. Bush’s administration was all too willing to assist in constructing. But Aslan thinks such a dramatic clash is fictional, a way of illegitimately putting one face on myriad local dissatisfactions, such as Iraqi anger at the U.S. military occupation, Palestinian anger at Israeli policies, Taliban anger at the Musharraf-Bush alliance in Pakistan, and mujahedeen anger in southern Thailand. Even if there is no one grievance that explains suicide bomber attacks on innocents, socioeconomic theorists detect common threads of poverty and lack of education. According to this view, suicide bombing results from the radical despair of crushing poverty and the humiliation of subaltern status, and therefore constitutes an insurrection by the oppressed classes. In some cases the oppressive power is domestic, but more often it is a foreign power. The 1998 militant Muslim “Declaration on Armed Struggle against Jews and Crusaders,” which was signed by bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, argued that it was the duty of every Muslim to fight the United States and the “satanically inspired supporters allying with them.”

  This interpretation of terrorism as a rebellion suggests that a removal of oppressive forces and policies will result in the end of suicide bombing. It is no stretch to see that such a view of aberrant behavior corresponds generally to Zimbardo’s doctrine that situational forces can transform anyone into a monster. In this view, monstrous behavior becomes “rational” in the sense that it can be correlated with, if not predicted from, specific social conditions.

  One of the major objections to such a view is the simple fact that a majority of the world’s poor do not blow themselves up in order to kill innocent people. In other words, the explanation is neither necessary nor sufficient. Another damaging objection is the increasing data indicating that suicide bombers are not as poor nor as uneducated as previously believed. The Princeton economics professor Alan Krueger has gathered data on hate crimes and terrorism since the early 1990s and claims that “the available evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate education as important causes of support for terrorism or participation in terrorist activities. Such explanations have been embraced almost entirely on faith, not scientific evidence.”45 Analyzing data from the Pew Research Center’s 2004 Global Attitudes Project in Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey, Krueger found the opposite of the received view: people with higher education were much more likely to see suicide bombing as justifiable. In a study of Hezbollah martyrs (shahids), Krueger analyzed the life histories of 129 deceased shahids, again with surprising results: compared with the general Lebanese population, Hezbollah suicide bombers demonstrate a lower degree of poverty and a higher degree of education. Similar studies have found high levels of college education among Al-Qaida members as well.46

  But perhaps the general structural viewpoint may be maintained if we add the unique ideological ingredients of moral righteousness and afterlife rewards for martyrdom.47 A religious fanatic might more readily kill innocents in a suicide mission if his ideological system allows him to deny the innocent status of his victims. In the same way that some ideologies allow one to redefine terrorists as “freedom fighters,” so, too, some ideologies allow one to redefine innocents as “infidels.”

>   Religious ideologies often dehumanize those who do not fit inside the sanctuary of orthodoxy. Some critics have argued that Islam itself is intolerant, pugilistic, and incapable of conciliation with modernity. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali Muslim apostate, assessed the tragedy of 9/11 as a tragic consequence of Islam itself: “True Islam, as a rigid belief system and moral framework, leads to cruelty. The inhuman act of those nineteen hijackers was the logical outcome of this detailed system for regulating human behavior.”48 In this view, social and economic status does not matter so much as ideas about destiny, metaphysics, and theology.

  Osama bin Laden. Image courtesy of Photofest.

  MONSTERS OF IDEOLOGY

  In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI raised the dander of many Muslims by quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor who referred to Islam as “evil and inhuman.” Despite Benedict’s claim that the disparaging comments were a quotation and not his own view, the language of a “new crusade” was resuscitated in public discourse. Osama bin Laden himself was quick to embrace crusade terminology, both in chastising the pope for stirring the pot and in promising to return the aggression. “The response will be what you see and not what you hear,” bin Laden said, “and let our mothers bereave us if we do not make victorious our messenger of God.”49

  Clerics and devotees from many different religions have bathed God’s message in blood and given credence to the theory that monstrous actions such as suicide bombings are produced by monstrous religious beliefs. One critic of religion, Sam Harris, has continued an old tradition, from David Hume to Bertrand Russell, in calling for an end of faith. In his best-selling book The End of Faith, he argues that suicide bombers would be almost unimaginable without the fanatical religious beliefs to motivate and justify them: “Subtract the Muslim belief in martyrdom and jihad, and the actions of suicide bombers become completely unintelligible, as does the spectacle of public jubilation that invariably follows their deaths; insert these peculiar beliefs, and one can only marvel that suicide bombing is not more widespread.”50 Recently Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Martin Amis have lent their voices to the accusation that Islamic fundamentalism is an ideological cult of death.51