On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Historically, however, religious views about technology have not always followed the usual Frankenstein anxiety pattern. We are often led to believe that one is either a secular, Godless technophile or a God-fearing tech-nophobe. But many religious thinkers have interpreted technology as a tool that the Creator has given to mankind to help bring about a brighter future.27 Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, offers a contemporary version of this view when he says, “God, if it’s the God that I worship, created the universe and all the laws that regulate it, and gave us this incredible gift of an intellect. And I, like Galileo, don’t think that he gave us those abilities in order for us to forego their use. And so I think God kind of thinks that science is pretty cool!”28 From this perspective, biotechnology is God’s work. On the other side of the divide, I’ve already suggested that secular Darwinians can be very anxious and fearful (because of plieotropy and ecology, etc.) about the future uses of biotechnology. So both sides of the sacred-secular divide are more interesting than the usual caricatures.

  ARE MONSTERS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER?

  In our “you’re not the boss of me” culture, we’re hard-pressed to pass a value judgment on the posthuman modifications that others adopt. If someone wants to make herself into a cyborg, who am I to roll my eyes? If I want to genetically engineer my baby to have specific phenotypic qualities, who are you to prevent me?

  In earlier paradigms of monsterology, all hybridization and the mixing of forms was considered insidious, and such hybrids (e.g., hermaphrodites, conjoined twins, manticores, griffins) were treated with suspicion. But after the Darwinian revolution, and especially after the New Synthesis, we came to understand that deviation, variation, mixing, and even hybridization are mechanisms of all biology; underneath the stable species forms are hidden twists and turns of micromutation. In one sense, fusion, mishmash, and hodgepodge are the techniques of evolution. Darwin’s associate John Herschel even referred to Darwin’s chance variation and natural selection as the “law of higgledy-piggledy.”

  Our cultural comfort with variation and pastiche-based biology has only increased with the recent successes of biotechnology. Now we can more quickly and severely alter the bodies of animals and ourselves, just as natural genetic evolution has been doing over time. Once again, however, the postmodernists have jumped from a positive embrace of difference and blurred boundaries to the idea that no norms exist. How can we impose a teleological direction on our future biotech selves, our posthuman future, when all the old candidates of essentialism (e.g., God’s plan, fixed human nature) are now dead? We’re all becoming cyborg monsters after all, the postmodernists say, so we must learn to embrace and celebrate the change. The latest paradigm has reversed the ancient paradigm: now all hybrids, all variations are good.

  But there is a middle way. Yes, the puritanical and essentialist tendencies that led premoderns to suspect variation should be resisted, but it doesn’t follow that every hybrid or biotech pastiche must now be affirmed. As we remake ourselves and the planet with biotechnology, we are not totally rudderless in our navigations. Biotechnology has put us in the unique position of actually composing our biological future. Our generation is like Dr. Frankenstein standing over a table of miscellaneous limbs and organs, only we’re on the table, too. We can decide what sort of hodgepodge creature will emerge. And the cultural death of God has not robbed us of rational grounds for composing a new teleology for our species.

  We saw that from the time of Aristotle the monster concept has functioned as an opposing term to whatever has purpose. Nature, according to previous eras, has an orderly and observable developmental pattern: acorns grow into oak trees, humans give birth to humans, and generally speaking anatomical structures fit physiological functions. The fully completed or actualized state of a natural process (e.g., attaining oak tree status) was considered to be the end goal, or the purpose, or the telos of the process. Monsters are the things that never fulfill their purpose or never make it to their goal, either because the development was accidentally arrested (by internal or external causes) or because matter confused or retarded the realization of form or because some moral impurity deformed the creature’s true potential. Whatever the particulars, monsters were cases of development that missed their targets.

  But we now live in a Nature different from that of previous ages. Biotechnology shows us that we don’t know what the purpose or teleology of an animal species is (including ourselves), and we are increasingly capable of creating a new one. The old teleological goals for man—“to love God” for the theists, “to attain rational freedom” for the philosophers—were helpful in the sense that specific goals help one assess specific means. In previous eras one could assess how one was doing on the road to the natural goal, modifying one’s behavior or growth along the way. NaïVe and puerile as it sometimes was, one had a comforting map to navigate through life.

  Of course we don’t know the purposes of nature anymore because there are no purposes of nature, unless one wants to include the trivial Darwinian truism that animals seek to propagate themselves. If there are no preset (a priori) goals that humans are on their way to becoming, then biotech gives us a fresh opportunity to voluntarily assign ourselves some. We may decide, for example, that the reduction of needless human suffering is worth pursuing on a global scale, and biotechnology may have a role to play as a means to that end. More specifically, married people might decide to take up Nick Bostrom’s suggestion to engineer more monogamous affection between each other by pharmaceutically increasing certain hormone production.

  Moreover, the idea that we no longer have any firm foundations from which to critique some societies or individuals as monstrous is again the result of melodrama, perhaps from those who cannot overcome the despair of our posttheological paradigm. For example, it seems entirely reasonable to argue that spending all of one’s time, money, and energy on recreating one’s face and body through biotech procedures has negative consequences for the obsessed individuals and the societies they live in. To think of them as monstrous is certainly too harsh a judgment, or maybe “self-made tragic monsters” is an apt designation. I only want to suggest that there are still reasonable criteria and norms from which to make helpful value discriminations. First, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be beautiful, but there is significant empirical evidence that external modification does not actually deliver any of the inner satisfactions that such people crave. The cosmetic procedure is often a category mistake, a misidentification of the cause of one’s suffering (though I hasten to add that extreme mutilations from disease or wounds suffered in military service are indeed debilitating, and the quality of life for those afflicted is much improved by external modifications). Second, despite all the perfectionist rhetoric of the trans-humanists, trying to actually stop and reverse aging is still akin to trying to square a circle. Flesh is inherently impermanent, and trying to make it permanent remains in the realm of pipe dreams. Third, given the fact that human beings have great creative potential in the fine arts, in social diplomacy, in philanthropy, in scholarly pursuits, in craftsmanship, and in the sciences, it’s a sad fact that spending one’s energy capital on rhinoplasty actually prevents the actualization of so much other great potential. In the same way that a life of television watching essentially prevents a young child from doing so many other wonderful things, so, too, the life of cosmetic attention is like a slow leak in the faucet of human potential. And what is said here about the individual is only magnified when we consider the larger societies of cosmetic obsession. Obviously, there are much more extreme abuses of biotechnology, such as governments developing biological germ warfare, but those only demonstrate more effortlessly that our powers of normative judgment are entirely intact after the death of traditional teleology.

  As we chart new teleologies with biotechnology, two things seem crucial. First, choices for such directions must be the result of democratic process, not autocratic statecraft. Politicians should
not impose the norms of the future; we’ve already seen what kind of monsters that sort of project produces. Second, I would argue that a major source of data for setting our future direction has to be biology. The idea that human norms and values have nothing to do with the biological facts of our existence is an idea that has foundered and played itself out. Learning more about our emotional, physiological, and cognitive powers, limitations, and tendencies will help us chart a clear-eyed biotech course, one that steers between the Scylla of denial and Luddite avoidance and the Charybdis of gung-ho abandon.

  Whatever form this new era of nonteleological nature takes, we can be sure that the concept of monster does not lose its semantic power by extension to everything. Previous eras saw monsters as oppositions to an otherwise teleological nature; now that we’ve rejected such an idea of nature, the postmoderns are cheerfully folding us all under the monster umbrella and celebrating the end of rational discrimination itself. But monster is as useful in ordinary language as it’s ever been. Moreover, the family resemblance of monster meanings has had significant integrity over the ages. It may not have the connotations of abject failure that it previously held, because teleology is not what it was, but it is still used to define the relatively unhealthy aspects of our social, psychological, cultural, and biological environments. The term and the concept of monster are still very useful.

  Epilogue

  One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of the light, but by making

  the darkness conscious.

  CARL JUNG

  THE IDEA THAT WE PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED in monsters but now we don’t is a comforting illusion. In May 2008 eleven elderly people accused of being witches were dragged from their homes and burned to death by a mob in western Kenya.1 Down the coast, in Malawi, witches are believed to be cannibals who possess supernatural powers and use their unholy skills to harass, kill, and feed on the meat of their dead victims. Witch hunting has led to many vigilante killings and even large numbers of state-enforced incarcerations.2 The tendency is to assume that such supernatural extremism is the result of illiteracy, yet the Malawian writer Pilirani Semu-Banda claims that “the witch-hunting activities are occurring in towns and cities where most people are educated.” Adding to the indigenous African traditions of witchcraft, Roman Catholicism, which is the religious majority in Malawi, has contributed its own mon-sterology tradition. Father Stanislaus Chinguo, chairman of the Catholic Commission for Justice in the Blantyre archdiocese, told Semu-Banda that witchcraft is real and the Church is working on solutions to meet the challenge head-on, including the renewal of exorcism practices.

  Closer to home, in fact in my own hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, a woman confessed in April 2008 that she murdered her six-year-old daughter because the child was possessed by a demon. Nelly Vazquez-Salazar admitted to killing her daughter, Elizabeth, after the young child woke the mother in the middle of the night. The mother had been in consultation with Elizabeth’s grandmother in Mexico because the child had recently been sleepwalking. Both mother and grandmother had come to the conclusion that the child was possessed.3

  Lest we think that such supernatural monsters are currently confined to the developing world and immigrant groups, we must recognize that large populations in the American Bible Belt are still literally haunted by demons and regularly employ exorcism as a defense. In June 2008 a Texas high court ruled against a woman who was seeking damages against the church that allegedly injured her during her exorcism.4 Laura Schubert claimed that she was pinned to the floor for hours and received minor injuries and psychological trauma from her 1996 exorcism. In the 2008 decision Justice David Medina wrote that finding the church liable “would have an unconstitutional ‘chilling effect’ by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs.” So in effect, exorcism is recognized and protected by the law.

  Contemporary cultural interest in monsters is still very strong. Most people reading this book are probably not overly worried about witches in their neighborhood or possessed family members. But other monster manifestations are of keen interest, even to the jaded and cynical hipsters who look down their nose at gullible bumpkins. My own students, who sometimes fancy themselves a part of the intellectual elite of American culture, are obsessed with cryptozoology, serial killer murderabilia, and monster-killing video gaming.

  Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, may be the most famous cryptid purported to exist. Photos began emerging in the 1930s, and since then there have been more than four thousand sightings of the Scottish leviathan. The monster is such a tourist draw that it is estimated to bring twelve million dollars into the Scottish Highlands every year. The credulity index for cryptids continues to be shored up by truly amazing discoveries in real paleontology. In February 2008 a fossil of a record-breaking fifty-foot-long sea monster was discovered by a Norwegian team of paleontologists. This gigantic Jurassic pliosaur had dagger-like teeth the size of cucumbers and a mouth large enough to consume a small car. In December 2007 fossil experts in Germany found the largest bug ever discovered, a monstrous sea scorpion that measured more than eight feet long. Bigger than most crocodiles, the Jaekelopterus rhenaniae acted as a superpredator, chopping up fish and other arthropods with giant spiked claws. Our imaginations are obviously fired up by these wonderful fossil discoveries, and though the creatures are long extinct they continue to hold out the tantalizing possibility of monsters living in remote regions. Even without any serious commitment to the reality of cryptids we still demonstrate a playful mania for monsters and marvels. “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids,” which is traveling from 2007 to 2012, has drawn huge crowds in New York and Chicago and is reported to be the most popular exhibit in decades at the American Museum of Natural History.5

  One of the more interesting examples of monster fascination in our contemporary culture, especially among the hip and sardonic set, is the collecting of murderabilia. Serial killers are so fascinating that their personal belongings and their “artistic” creations are fetishized and turned into highly valuable commodities that are traded and purchased by collectors of the macabre. The Internet has fueled a significant underground industry for monster property. Paintings by John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, and Richard Ramirez (the Nightstalker) and personal items of Charles Manson, among others, have all become hot commodities. When the journalist Michael Harvey visited my college class as a guest lecturer, he brought one of Gacy’s original clown paintings to class. Recall from chapter 13 that Harvey was the last journalist to speak to Gacy the night before he was executed by lethal injection. Gacy gave him several paintings as a gift. When Harvey allowed my students to pass around the creepy painting they could barely contain themselves, and most of them took cellphone photos of the painting as a souvenir. I can’t pretend that I was above the weird sensation of horror and excitement, loathing and thrill, as I held the ominous picture.

  It’s not clear that the average collector can even articulate why he or she collects such ghoulish material, although some superstitious curators claim that owning a murderer’s possessions is like having a talisman protecting them from misfortune. My own view is that murderabilia is just one more attempt, albeit circuitous, to de-monster our world. We live in a consumer culture, and consumption not only fulfills desires but also is a means of imposing order and control. Commodifying a horror is one way of objectifying and managing it. Just as a more religious culture might bring its spiritual paraphernalia and its priest class to bear on a monstrous threat, a consumer culture brings its capital to bear. If monsters (in this case, serial killers) churn the stomach, horrify the heart, and boggle the mind, we respond with whatever powers we possess. Buying a monster memento brings the unintelligible creepiness into the light of a quotidian transaction.

  Other bourgeois approaches to monsters can be seen in our developed secular society. A whole new horror genre has emerged, for example, in our prosperous culture. The film theorist Barry Grant noticed a tendency in s
ome movies to capitalize on our fears about losing wealth and status.6 Films such as Fatal Attraction (1987), Single White Female (1992), and even Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) can be read as economic horror films, in which the monsters bring financial ruin and middle-class catastrophe.

  Middle-class monsters may not be as supernatural as the monsters of old, but they still harass their victims and keep them awake late at night. Since my son was born, I have watched an enormous amount of daytime children’s television. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. Entire cable networks are devoted to kids’ cartoons, and several times an hour the programming is interrupted to show commercials to the assumed audience. The demographers are convinced that two populations are watching these shows: kids and moms. For the kids, commercials range between unicorn dolls and racing cars, but for the moms the ads are astoundingly one-dimensional. In the relatively safe world of middle-class America, the one reliable phobia to which advertisers can appeal is poor hygiene. Every housewife’s phobia about germs is seized on and celebrated with Oscar-winning special effects. Only Brand X cleaning solution, represented as a purifying acid of goodness, can annihilate the invisible monsters. Computer animation has been enlisted to create seething green, tentacled hordes of bacterial monsters that crawl up out of the toilet bowl to overcome one’s precious children or grow ominously as an evil fetid gas from the kitty-litter box or seep up from the kitchen drain, with slimy fangs and pulsing tissue, to infect one’s whole family. One must remain equally vigilant about the creatures throbbing on the shower floor and those festering in the carpet. The animated representations of these threats to hygiene are increasingly taken directly from the drawer of monster movie special effects. The toilet bowl monsters look far more menacing than anything in premillennial horror films.