3Special thanks to Yu-Ting Su for introducing me to anti-natalism and offering suggestions for further reading.
26
Why Bad Things Happen to Good Monsters
TRIP MCCROSSIN
How, if there is already so much evil in the world, could Victor Frankenstein introduce still more? Reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we can’t help but wonder about this, about the nature of “good and evil” generally, and also, more specifically, about the “problem of evil.”
The problem of evil is usually posed as a question: “Why do bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad?” It began its life as a theological problem, as far back as the Old Testament’s Book of Job, and in various places since, including the monster’s favorite book, Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Job’s problem is generalized to all, as the problem of how, if God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, and yet there is so much evil in the world, we may “justify the ways of God to Man.”
The problem is also a secular one. How, as the secular version goes, can we make reasonable sense of a world replete with seemingly unreasonable suffering? Whatever other problems he may have, the monster surely has this one—as do we.
When Will the Monster Die?
Shelley ends her story with a sad and troubling image. The monster has discovered his creator, recently dead as a result of their long struggle, and, bemoaning the tragedy, speaks movingly of his own death by suicide and the possibility of an afterlife, at which point, as Shelley concludes her manuscript, he springs from the cabin window “onto an ice-raft” and “pushing himself off” is “carried away by the waves” as we lose “sight of him in the darkness & distance.”
Left with so tantalizingly open-ended an image, we naturally strain to see what’s become of him. Where has he gone? His talk of suicide was a promise, yes? Might he change his mind? If so, to what end, and if he’s “not even of the same nature as man,” for how long? Depending on our answers, we are more or less distant, more or less at risk, more or less anxious.
As Shelley’s story has taken root in popular culture over the years, through a long series of adaptations and interpretations, from James Whale’s 1931 classic, Frankenstein, to the most recent entry, Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein, the question of the monster’s survival and temperament has been a persistent theme.
In the three classic movie sequels to Frankenstein, for example, the monster appears continually able to survive attempts on his life: the burning of the castle in the original, the destruction of the laboratory at the end of Bride of Frankenstein, being thrust into a pit of molten sulfur at the end of Son of Frankenstein, only to be found entombed, but alive in The Ghost of Frankenstein, at the end of which he seems finally to die, engulfed by fire, but have we not witnessed him suffer a similar fate already? We can’t help wondering about the monster’s survival, but also about his temperament. Would such attempts be called for, we wonder, if he were not so threatening, but would he be so threatening if were not so poorly treated?
More recently, in the Dean Koontz Frankenstein series of novels, from 2004 to 2011, the monster not only survives, but does so clear into our era, and not only this, but has also retrieved his original benevolence, helping to save humanity from his creator, who has also survived, but with his original scientific outlook having taken on newly disturbing dimensions. More recently still, in 2013, we not only have I, Frankenstein, but also Andrew Weiner’s movie The Frankenstein Theory. The latter is based on the idea that Shelley’s novel is a “fictionalization of one of the most incredible true events in human history,” that the monster again survives into our era, living still within the Arctic Circle, and that a distant relative of his original creator, Professor Jonathan Venkenheim, recently disgraced for his theory, has set out in search of him, in fulfillment of life-long personal ambition and in pursuit of professional redemption.
While the expedition is ultimately endangered by the monster, Venkenheim is persistently reassuring, that they can and should “appeal to its humanity,” that the monster “is capable of reason . . . not some mindless animal . . . reacts violently to fear and to anger . . . is something that has been searching for companionship its entire life … has been rejected over and over again . . . is intelligent . . . will respond to a sympathetic hand.” The appeal goes tragically unheeded, however, leading to a grisly monster’s-bride twist in the end.
I, Frankenstein, on the other hand, based on a graphic novel by the same name by Kevin Grevioux, has the monster also surviving into our era, but, more interestingly, in the spirit of Koontz’s narrative, also retrieving his original benevolence, even while haunted by a recurring nineteenth-century nightmare.
Things force their way into my mind uninvited to disturb the peace in my soul. It’s always the same. “I’m being born again. One moment I’m standing in front of my father . . . The next, I’m running for my life. Then I strike. And become . . . undone. I become the beast. The monster. The abomination. And my rage will not be denied . . . Then I wake. The dream again. But it wasn’t a dream. It was true. It was a long time ago, but it happened. That monster is dead. I can’t go back. I won’t.
He can’t and won’t, that is, dedicated as he is to protecting humanity, this time not from his creator, but from legions of long dormant monsters: “There is a war coming. A war mentioned only in hushed whispers and the shadows of time. A time when the sons of God and the daughters of men produced monsters upon earth. When the flood came they were defeated, but they were not undone. They would rise again to finish what they started and end the time of man on earth.”1 The monster, once again his original benevolent self, is all that stands now, it seems, between humanity and oblivion.
Depending on the monster’s survival and temperament, then, we are more or less distant, more or less at risk, more or less anxious, and maybe also more or less hopeful.
If Victor Is the Modern Prometheus, Is His Monster a Modern Job?
The parable of Job has never wanted for fans. The very best that humanity has to offer, even by God’s standards, Job sees his happiness turned suddenly to the worst possible suffering and misery, which, unbeknownst to him, God and Satan have cavalierly agreed to in order to test his faith. Job ultimately does keep the faith, and for this he is redeemed and rewarded. Hence the parable: however comforting it may be to know what we understand we cannot, most importantly the reasons why we suffer, if we resist the hubris of the attempt, while remaining faithful that such reasons exist, but are not for us to know, then our suffering will end, eventually, and we will be, as Job was, redeemed and rewarded.
The parable enjoyed renewed resonance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a variety of translations, paraphrases, and interpretations by a variety of poets, theologians, and philosophers. The problem of evil was certainly in the public eye, then, and so likely part of Shelley’s general mindset, in the form of these various engagements with the parable of Job, including the monster’s favorite book, Paradise Lost, and the century-long controversy that began with the publication in 1697 of Pierre Bayle’s widely read and debated Historical and Critical Dictionary.
Bayle argued that in spite of the Enlightenment’s faith in the power of human reason, understanding God’s apparent inaction in the face of the overall misery of the human condition is a task that human reason is simply and literally unable to accomplish. He was untroubled by such a deflation of reason, leading naturally he thought to a corresponding inflation of faith, but for others, his assault on reason was insufferable, first and foremost to the so-called “Optimists” who flourished in early decades of the eighteenth century.
Running together “natural evils,” such as earthquakes and illnesses, and the “moral evils” we also suffer, as a result of our intentional cruelty toward one another, Optimists exonerate God and render the world perfectly reasonable by simply denying the existence of innocent sufferers, and rendering natural and moral evils alike simply the wages of sin. Everything
is, according to Optimism, as it ought to be in this, “the best of all possible worlds.” This all came to a crashing end, as Susan Neiman vividly describes, on the morning of November 1st, 1755. The cataclysmic earthquake that struck Lisbon that day, and the inferno and tidal wave that followed, killed tens of thousands of its citizens, and with them the Optimists’ response to the problem of evil. The scope of the suffering simply overwhelmed any hope the Optimists had of reasonably equating what we suffer with what we deserve and what’s ultimately good for us. From the death of Optimism emerges a more conflicted sort of choice, for Shelley and for us, between the competing perspectives offered us by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire.
Their very public rivalry, around how best to respond to the tragedy of the Lisbon earthquake, and to the problem of evil more generally, is a signal event, Neiman contends, in the advent of “Modernity.” Being modern may mean different things to different people, but at its core it means at least a firm distinction finally between moral and physical evil, and the transformation of the problem of evil from a theological problem into a secular one as well.
So, is the monster cut from Job’s mold, and is he a modern Job to boot? That Shelley likely had the parable of Job in mind general speaking, does not, in and of itself, make the monster properly Job-like, but if at the same time we listen to him, it’s difficult not to hear in his cries and pleadings echoes of Job’s own. He is repeatedly and unreasonably mistreated, in each case with a “howl of devilish despair,” first by the De Laceys, whom he has cherished, then by the rustic, whose child he has just saved, and finally by his creator, with whom he had not long ago been “content to reason,” even while knowing full well that he was the author, passively or actively, of his suffering.
In other ways, though, the monster appears just as distinctly unlike Job. His general lament, “This was then the reward of my benevolence!,” goes ultimately unrequited, even his creator denying him any reasonable comfort, and in the end he loses his faith in the reasonableness of his creator’s actions, and of humanity in general, and moves from sufferer to punisher. How is it that he begins life in the spirit of Job, and yet in his struggle with Victor seems to stray so far from it? A clue may be that in his favorite book, Paradise Lost, he reads of God and creation, Satan and the rebel angels, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, its forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil, succumbing to temptation and being expelled, and so on and so forth, and reads it all as “a true history,” which “moved every feeling of wonder and awe,” but not, it seems, as his history.
The monster’s problem of evil is a secular one, of justifying not “the Ways of God to Man,” but “the Ways of . . . Man” to monsters, given that the former appear to be the considerably more monstrous of the two. In this, if he’s a Job, he’s a modern Job, in that his problem of evil is a secular problem, and as such it is also ours.
What’s a Modern Job to Do?
Rousseau insisted perhaps most fundamentally, as Shelley was aware from her studies, that we are not naturally corrupt, but rather by our own design. “All is good leaving the hands of the author of things,” he famously tells us at the outset of Émile, “but degenerates in human hands,” in the spirit of the monster’s description of himself, as he begins to tell his story to his maker, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
Our salvation is in our own hands, he insisted, by means of a quest for self-knowledge, first to confirm our basic goodness, to devise then a useful history of the accumulated causes of our corruption, not unlike what the monster finds most striking in Volney’s Ruins of Empire, and finally a better way to educate ourselves for, and organize ourselves into society. Rousseau believed absolutely that we could, and should do this, and that we would remake ourselves in the process, leaving behind finally our generally alienated state, and happily regaining our former benevolence.
However appealingly Rousseau’s hopeful perspective may have seemed, though, still we may find it, as Voltaire found it, to be ultimately inadequate in the face of persistently unreasonable suffering. As Neiman has argued, two competing traditions of response emerge in the wake of Lisbon, one beginning with Rousseau and insisting, as above, that “morality demands that we make evil intelligible,” the other with Voltaire and insisting that “morality demands that we don’t.” Perhaps we are better off, as Shelley might have thought, as the monster might have too, and as we might still, to follow Voltaire’s famous character, Candide, in declaring that in the face of ever cleverer theories and ever persistent evil, the best we can do is to shrug and, in isolation from society, and with limited companionship, more narrowly “tend to our garden.”
The monster had learned from Volney the sad history of humanity, after all, and turned away “with disgust and loathing.” Had the sort of quest for self-knowledge that Rousseau had envisioned been taken up, however, and yielded the will to correct the corruption revealed, and a program with which to do so, then perhaps he could have entered society more safely than what he experienced in attempting to join the De Lacey family. Ironically, it had been taken up. The monster may perhaps be forgiven for being hopeful, that is, in that he would also remember from Volney, along with “details of vice and bloodshed,” a vision reflecting, with some reservation, the hopeful revolutionary spirit of the times.
In the novel’s closing moments, in response to Walton’s moral outrage, the monster defends in equally moral terms his remorse over the death of his creator, and in general the misery he has wrought. In the process, he lays out his plan for his own extinction, seemingly promissory, though in reality perhaps it is only a longing. He bids farewell to his recently deceased maker, in the more generous mindset now afforded him, “if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hast not yet ceased to think and feel, thou desirest not my life for my own misery,” but rather so that “I might not cause greater wretchedness” to greater numbers. Once this is done, he has left only to take comfort that “soon [… my] spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus,” and to bid to Walton his final farewell.
The monster’s final plea is equal parts sadness, disbelief, and self-loathing in response to the loss of his former uncorrupted benevolence, which, taken together, form the basis for his passionate rejection of Walton’s accusations of hypocrisy in mourning his maker’s death. At the center of all of this is the monster’s admission that his preferred benevolence could not withstand, it seems, the tortures of the problem of evil at its most fundamental. Worse even than bad things happening to good people, that is, are good things happening to bad. The monster “pitied” Victor, he admits, and “his pity amounted to horror,” and he “abhorred” himself as a result, and when he discovers that Victor, who had caused him such misery and despair, “dared to hope for happiness,” then what could he feel but “impotent envy and bitter indignation.”
Key here is that he felt these things, was filled with such malevolence, but seems no longer so, having acquired a new sort of self-awareness. As we lose “sight of him in the darkness and distance,” we can’t help but wonder how long he will survive, and to what end. As we wonder this, remembering his struggle with the problem of evil, and the apparent change in temperament that appears to result in the end, we cannot help but wonder whether the right sort of self-knowledge is indeed the answer, for the monster and for us, and that it can eventually be had, even while we may always be at risk from the Victors of the world.
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1Kevin Grevioux, I, Frankenstein
27
Good and Ugly
WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ
My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.
We may not want to admit it, but we all know that we
often make our decisions, our ethical decisions, based on beauty and ugliness. What we find attractive tends to be “right” and what we find repulsive, like Frankenstein’s monster, is “wrong.”
Even though ethical reflection seems to be a rational activity, many ethical decisions are made based on purely instinctual and irrational motives. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein disrupts our ways of determining moral goodness and moral ugliness: in Branagh’s movie it’s Victor Frankenstein who’s morally decrepit and the “ugly” monster who excels at morality—he is a moral virtuoso until humanity fills him with hate.
Are Beauty and Morality Related?
Plato (427–347 B.C.E.) was one of the first philosophers to examine the meaning and value of art. Plato believed all art was a mimesis (an imitation) of all forms. He established a connection between aesthetics and moral evaluation.1 For Plato, beauty serves the purpose of taking us from physical beauty to the beauty of the mind.
Plato believe that art, drama, and music play important roles in the formation of character. Art influences behavior as strongly as culture and environment, and artistic representations provide positive or negative models of character and conduct. We can still see this way of thinking not just in Frankenstein but in every movie or novel that employs ugliness or deformity as a kind of visual stand-in for evil.
Colin McGinn, a philosopher at Rutgers University, developed a theory of morality that examines the connection between evaluations of beauty and assumptions about right and wrong. For the sake of argument, McGinn suggests there are two species of human beings. “G-beings” are people who are sympathetic to the joys of others and empathic with the suffering of others.2 These are people whom we might consider to be of good character.
The second species of people, called “E-beings,” exhibit the opposite characteristics. These people not only take pleasure in the suffering of others, they also feel pleasure in causing suffering in others. In fact, the more pain E-beings can inflict on others, the more pleasure they receive. McGinn concludes that E-beings will be likely to become moral degenerates or evil persons, while G-beings will be likely to become moral exemplars or virtuous persons.
Frankenstein and Philosophy Page 29
