Monster-making Now! The Horror! The Horror!

Sorry about the delay, my friends–job market surge and whatnot…  I had a great post about moobs and mipples ready, but didn’t have the huevos to post it.  So, this one will have to do.

In discussing the possesion of those aforementioned euphemistic eggs, it never ceases to amaze me that philosophers and theologians can get so much milage out of the concept of monstrosity (I can too, check out the latest issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts).  And though they are often excellent scholars, I just have a hard time taking them seriously.  Take, for instance, this article on the Chronicle website by Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, Stephen T. Asma.  Asma argues, and quite effectively, that monsters help teach us about our own humanity by capturing our moral imagination.  I don’t disagree that the issue of monstrosity lies at the heart of  humanism, even in the twentieth century.  I cannot follow how Professor Asma gets to this conclusion, though, as it feels like begging the question.  Isn’t it our moral imagination that creates monsters?

I should clarify my objection.  Asma acknowledges some of the history of this concept, and for this I applaud him, as most scholars tend to gloss over epistemology here.  As he tells us at one point:

In our liberal culture, we dramatize the rage of the monstrous creature—and Frankenstein’s is a good example—then scold ourselves and our “intolerant society” for alienating the outcast in the first place. The liberal lesson of monsters is one of tolerance: We must overcome our innate scapegoating, our xenophobic tendencies. Of course, this is by no means the only interpretation of monster stories. The medieval mind saw giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies—warnings of impending calamity.

Again, this acknowledgement from a philosophy professor seems great in comparison to the scant history that most offer, and in this I would cite Timothy Beal’s Religion and its Monsters as a possible exception.  More on him in a moment.  First, we must recognize that the word monster itself IS Roman (at least a derivative of the infinitive monere, to warn).  However, I also think we need to acknowledge that our conception of monstrosity is also still medieval.  The number of Americans that believe in a literal Satan is staggering.

I object far more, however, when Asma tells us that his “own view is that the concept of monster cannot be erased from our language and thinking.”   “Monster” cannot be replaced by other more polite terms and concepts, because it still refers to something that has no satisfactory semantic substitute or refinement. The term’s imprecision, within parameters, is part of its usefulness.”  This argument sounds suspiciously like the overwhelming positive response that John Horgan gets when he asks students if they think war is inevitable.  It seems wrong both to resign us to a continued existence with monsters and also to gloss over part of the reason for our difficulty with getting rid of it.  First of all, the reason we cannot replace the term monstrosity with another, euphemistic term is that (much like a shark) it is already so evolved.  Asma is right to point out the long history of the term, but he leaves out details like how the Church apologists over the years have adapted the meaning of terms such as “pagan,” “savage,” or “monster.”  Talk about intelligent design, this term has been employed meticulously over the past 2000 years to draw careful lines between the pious and outsider.  And this religious residue is not confined to linguistics.  Look at any paintings of Jews or Arabs from 15th, 16th, or even 17th century Spain–they often look like very otherworldly creatures, because their monstrosity had captured the moral imagination of Catholic Spain and the Church’s inquisitors.  So, when someone cites the terms usefulness, I find myself asking, “Useful for whom?”

What I find even more interesting in the article, though, is his reference to cognitive psychology.  As he states his thesis:

A crucial but often-ignored aspect of monsterology is the role those beasties play in our moral imaginations. Recent experimental moral psychology has given us useful tools for looking at the way people actually do their moral thinking. Brain imaging, together with hypothetical ethical dilemmas about runaway trolley cars, can teach us a lot about our real value systems and actions. But another way to get at this subterranean territory is by looking at our imaginative lives.

Why did this make me chuckle?  Because I am a contrary and pedantic jerk?  Perhaps, but I simply don’t understand how one cites various science fiction and techno-horror stories in an article on monstrosity, and then gives evidence from “brain imaging.”  As Timothy Beal’s book points out, partly in a lengthy discussion of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, science or rationalism IS often the monster in a figurative sense.  And this position of science becomes evident in science fiction novels, beginning with Frankenstein and  continuing well into our present age.   Bombs, chemical and biological weapons, artificial intelligence, or whatever will be the downfall of humanity.  As Stephen King tells us, “at the end of all rationalism, the mass grave.”  Hence why Barry Malzberg boasts that sf is the “beast born in the era of the Enlightenment, to snarl at the heart” of science.  In the context of Asma’s argument, though, he seems to use science and denounce it at once.

Finally, he may be correct when he says that comparing the torture at the hands of the Taliban to American soldiers at Abu Ghraib does not “prove that monsters don’t exist.”  However, he also errs when he calls this unnamed interlocutor a “relativist.”  It is Asma, in this case, who is the relativist.  In claiming that “The meaning of ‘monster’ is found in its context, in its use,” he places it in a aporia in which its meaning depends on its situation.  If he were only pointing out, as I think he is honestly trying to do, that the word is still dangerous when we use it today, that would be fine.  But in doing so, he forgets a very real history of the term, divorcing it from its very religious origins and that, I think, is wrong.  I for one will be celebrating my own monstrosity this Saturday, knowing full well that somewhere, some group is passing out fliers denouncing Halloween as the pagan, monstrous holiday that it is…

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