On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (38 page)

In spite of its ingenuity, I confess that this Oedipal aspect of Freudian logic is simply too sly for me. The links in the argument are a bit too tenuous and the evidence seems truant, but more important the phenomenon of prejudice that “incest repression” purports to explain is better explained by another, more empirically grounded Freudian mechanism, the one I’ve already articulated: aggression. The “convenient other” of anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice are understandable as expressions of the human tendency to carve the world into friends and enemies. “Nothing seems more natural,” says the Freud scholar Peter Gay, “than the ease with which humans claim superiority over a collective Other. It is an immensely serviceable alibi for aggression.”
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The drive for
power
over others seems to me more intuitively clear, although (to give the Oedipal theorists their due) that might be because incest is at a lower, more socially repugnant level of the subconscious.

In any case, this returns us to the question of criminal monsters like Leopold and Loeb. The emotions and behaviors I have been discussing—rage, sadism, revenge, homophobia—all share the unifying nucleus
of power
. Losing control and being victim to inner Id powers is readily recognized as monstrous, from Medea to Morbius. But obsessive pursuit of greater power and control is equally monstrous, leading to megalomania. When Nathan Leopold, referring to his and Loeb’s murder of Bobby Franks, asked “What was the motive for the crime then?” he had to admit that Loeb had some charismatic power over him: “My motive, so far as I can be said to have had one, was to please Dick. Just that—incredible as it sounds. I thought so much of the guy that I was willing to do anything—even
commit murder—if he wanted it bad enough. And he wanted to do this—very badly indeed.”
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When he tries to articulate Loeb’s motives he admits that no simple reductionist explanation will suffice, but he turns generally, like a good Freudian, to Loeb’s childhood. He claims that Loeb was raised by an intensely strict and critical governess who gave him an inferiority complex and led him to pursue later power trips. Loeb, according to Leopold, had an exaggerated need to prove himself, to demonstrate his own power.

The idea that monsters of the Id lurch out from repressed inner depths makes sense of certain kinds of narcissistic personality disorder, but it also bears a lineage with earlier Romantic views of evil. Criminal monsters, in this view, have a
Sturm und Drang
drama to them and seem like secularized versions of the earlier, theologically grounded evildoers. Despite all these ways that the Id might be responsible for violent crime, we must now turn to another psychological version of the twentieth-century monster. It is true that rage and other uncontrollable emotions lead to monstrous crimes, but a new kind of monster emerges in the twentieth century, one that, on the contrary, doesn’t seem to feel any emotions at all.
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This emotionless robotic deviance was in fact the more dominant characterization of Leopold and Loeb, in part because Clarence Darrow’s defense proffered such a picture. In his trial summation, Darrow referred to Nathan Loeb as “an intellectual machine, going without balance.” Erle Stanley Gardner said that the detached boys lacked some important “moral vitamins.”
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Leopold, in his autobiography, described his accomplice as utterly without scruples: “He wasn’t immoral; he was just plain amoral—unmoral, that is. Right and wrong didn’t exist. He’d do anything—anything. And it was all a game to him.”
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Under the constant scrutiny of the press and detectives, Leopold confessed to feeling like a laboratory experiment. “I suppose,” he recalled telling reporters, “you can justify this as easily as an entomologist can justify sticking a bug on a pin. Or a bacteriologist putting a microbe under his microscope.” But this badly expressed quip was taken to be a reference to the murder itself, so the legend of Leopold and Loeb as unfeeling experimenters became even stronger.
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I am more interested in the large-scale and changing cultural meanings of “monster” than I am in Leopold and Loeb proper, so I take it as significant (regardless of its accuracy) that the concept of robotic unemotional deviance played so successfully in the public media and imagination.

Serial murderer John Wayne Gacy (1942–1994). Pencil drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.

John Wayne Gacy (1942–1994) was an American serial killer who raped and murdered thirty-three boys in the 1970s. Gacy, who worked part time as a clown, ensnared young men and boys with bogus magic tricks, eventually trapping and murdering them. He kept the dead bodies near him for many days and then buried them in the crawl space under his home. The journalist Michael Harvey was able to interview Gacy many times after the “killer clown” was caught and imprisoned. Harvey, a lawyer as well as a journalist, uniquely gained Gacy’s confidence because he offered to discuss the legal issues of the case. Harvey spent long hours speaking with Gacy on the phone and in person at the prison. In the end he was the last journalist to speak to Gacy, the night before he was executed by lethal injection. He told me that Gacy had a noticeably cold, detached way of relating to other people: “Gacy very much wanted to depersonalize his victims. He would speak in a monotone as he described the specifics of a particular crime
or victim. His eyes would flatten out and empty of any sort of emotion. I think he saw his victims more as objects—like a newspaper or a coffee cup—rather than as people. He would even go so far as to refer to a victim sometimes with the impersonal pronoun ‘it,’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘him.’ ”
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The Canadian psychologist Robert Hare is probably the foremost authority on psychopathology and crime and is the creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist, a diagnostic tool that measures a subject’s degree of psychopathology and tendency toward violent behavior. In his book
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths among Us
, Dr. Hare profiles a variety of extreme and moderate psychopaths, arriving at a cluster of symptoms that include deceitfulness, egocentricity, grandiosity, impulsivity, manipulation, and, most important, lack of conscience and lack of empathy.
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“The world of unfeeling psychopaths is not limited to the popular images of monsters who steal people’s children or kill without remorse,” says Dr. Hare. “After all, if you are bright, you have been brought up with good social skills, and you don’t want to end up in prison, so you probably won’t turn to a life of violence. Rather, you’ll recognize that you can use your psychopathic tendencies more legitimately by getting into positions of power and control. What better place than a corporation?”
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Dr. Hare’s research, from serial killers to corporate psychopaths, only underscores that most deviance occurs in the form of a spectrum rather than binary categories. Of course, many people might think of their boss as a psychopath, but special odium is rightly reserved for violent offenders. “The association between psychopathy and violence should not be surprising,” according to Dr. Hare. “Many of the characteristics important for inhibiting antisocial and violent behavior…are lacking or deficient in psychopaths.”
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Perhaps it will be unsurprising, then, to find that only i percent of the overall population is psychopathic, but around 25 percent of the overall prison population is afflicted.

Empathy, the ability to identify with another person’s feelings, is significantly missing in people who commit heinous crimes. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick was intrigued when he read about the utter lack of empathy among Nazis. In large part, Dick’s novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
is an exploration of dehumanization. “Although it’s essentially a dramatic novel,” Dick explained, “the moral and philosophical ambiguities it dealt with are really very profound.”

[The story] stemmed from my basic interest in the problem of differentiating the authentic human being from the reflexive machine, which I call an android. In my mind “android” is a metaphor for people who are
physiologically human but behaving in a nonhuman way. I first became interested in this problem when I was doing research for
High Castle
. I had access to prime Gestapo documents at the closed stacks of California at Berkeley, and I came across some diaries by S.S. men stationed in Poland. One sentence in particular had a profound effect on me: “We are kept awake at night by cries of starving children.” There was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote that. I later realized that what we were essentially dealing with in the Nazis was a defective group mind—a mind so emotionally defective that the word human could not be applied to them.
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Blade Runner
(1982), the highly regarded film version of Dick’s novel, centers around the main character, Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), and explores these questions of our humanity. Deckard makes his living as a bounty hunter in the degenerating techno-environment of futuristic Los Angeles. His job is to hunt down and kill (retire) “replicants,” artificial humanoids that have been manufactured as slaves on space stations and are indistinguishable from human beings. This makes them highly dangerous if they should make their way back to earth; hence the need for a small cadre of exterminators (“blade runners”), including Deckard. Replicants are manufactured with short life spans (e.g., four years) and they are given memories, language, and general intellectual skills to maximize their particular slave functions. The plot of the film tracks Deckard as he, in turn, tracks four fugitive replicants who are trying to reach their maker, a genetic engineer and corporate mogul named Tyrell. The premise is philosophical, as these rather likable creatures are on a mission to beg their God to grant them a little more life. As we get to know these characters, other philosophical issues emerge.

Replicants act as metaphors for the kinds of cold, robotic deviants I’ve been discussing. In the same way that we can wonder about the humanity of the Gestapo officer or the psychopath Paul Beart, the film
Blade Runner
meditates on replicant contenders for human status. Actually, since
human
is a zoological term, the real question is: What are the defining traits of a
person?
And what are the entitlements or rights that
personhood
entails? These questions go back to
Frankenstein
and earlier. Beyond simple sensations of pain and pleasure, we tend to think of emotions as crucial ingredients for being a person.
Blade Runner
offers us replicants with varying degrees of emotional life (pain, hopes, disappointment, desire, etc.). Does something deserve basic rights and respect when it is capable of feeling emotions?
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But not just any feelings will suffice. We recognize certain emotions in animals and yet we do not reward them person status (in fact,
we continue to devour them heartily). There seems to be an unspoken premium placed on the emotional levels of sophistication. Fear, for example, is widely prevalent in the animal kingdom, but
empathy
is an emotion that seems very rare except in the human species. Empathy is the power to place oneself in the position of someone or something else and intimately feel the emotions or motives of that other person or thing.
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In the film, blade runners are equipped with a special device, the Voight-Kampf test, which enables them to distinguish androids from nonandroids. The device measures the changes in the subject’s pupils when asked increasingly difficult questions, and the questions are designed to elicit empathy responses to scenarios of animal and human suffering (the eye as the window to the soul is a repeated theme throughout the movie). The film suggests that some of the replicants, the character Leon, for example, are rudimentary in their emotional equipment, and this can be easily detected through the empathy test. When Leon is asked what he would do if he came across an overturned tortoise suffering in the sun, he cannot empathically process the scenario. Other characters, such as Roy, evolve emotional sophistication that eventually reaches the level of empathy. The climax of the film, in fact, can be read as a transfiguration of replicant Roy to fully human Roy by the empathic act of saving the life of a fellow sufferer (Deckard). Actually an even deeper transfiguration is implied because Roy saves not only a fellow sufferer, but his enemy.
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Interestingly, the U.S. military has created a device that looks very much like the Voight-Kampf test, and they use it to scan the eyes of Iraqi men. It has been extremely difficult for U.S. soldiers to differentiate friends from insurgent enemies while fighting in Iraq. The eye scanner is designed to take subtle biometrics rather than detect empathic responses, but the use of such a litmus test on enemies is somewhat unsettling.