On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (63 page)

42
. According to this view, monsters from the ghetto are brutal and actively aggressive, but the corrupt legal and political systems that overcrowd prisons and build local economies on incarceration are just passive-aggressive, institutional versions of equally dehumanizing tendencies. Michel Foucault’s argument in
Discipline and Punish
suggests that modern forms of state-controlled surveillance and psychological manipulation by more “humane” methods (such as the panopticon) only
appear
to be less insidious than the corporeal punishments of pre-Enlightenment Europe.
Suffice it to say that Foucault and his devotees are strong proponents of the structural theory (or social constructivism) of deviance. There are no real monsters except those defined so by the powerful.

43
. See Raymond Ibrahim, ed.,
Al-Qaida Reader
(Broadway, 2007).

44
. See Reza Aslan, “Why Do They Hate Us?”
Slate.com
, August 6, 2007.

45
. Alan Krueger, “What Makes a Terrorist?”
The American: A Magazine of Ideas
, December 2007, at American.com. Alberto Abadie, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, has argued that the level of political freedom, not poverty, explains terrorism. He told the
Harvard Gazette
, “In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it’s not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin.” Abadie argues that it is areas with intermediate levels of political freedom that experience the most terrorism. Both societies with high levels of political freedom and authoritarian regimes have quite low levels of terrorism. “Tight control and repressive practices keep terrorist activities in check, while nations making the transition to more open, democratic governments may be politically unstable, which makes them more vulnerable.” Quoted in Alvin Powell, “Freedom Squelches Terrorist Violence,”
Harvard Gazette
, November 4, 2004.

46
. Marc Sageman,
Understanding Terror Networks
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004),
chapter 3
.

47
. Of course, a higher degree of education in the terrorist population begs the question about what sort of education. If the higher levels of study are just in the Qur’an, Sharia, and Hadith exegesis, then one cannot conclude much about the traditional liberalizing effects of learning. If, however, the higher education is more than indoctrination, then Krueger’s findings may be the most compelling evidence that Muslim outrage is not ideological at all, but an informed sense of political injustice. This would not necessarily negate the structural explanation of terrorism, but only reorient it away from religious and economic motivations and toward nationalist ones.

48
. Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
Infidel
(Free Press, 2007).

49
. From an audiotape, attributed to bin Laden, released in March 2008, quoted in Ian Fisher, “Vatican Dismissed bin Laden Accusation of ‘Crusade,’ ”
New York Times
, March 21, 2008.

In April 2007 a small publishing house in Malatya, Turkey, was attacked, apparently because it distributed Bibles. Three employees, a German and two Turks, were found with their hands and legs bound and their throats slit. Five suspects were arrested, each of whom carried a letter that said, “We five are brothers. We are going to our deaths.” This sort of violence, which admittedly is decentralized, gives credence to the idea that at least some of the terrorism is religiously or ideologically grounded.

50
. Sam Harris,
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
(Norton, 2004),
chapter 1
.

51
. See Martin Amis’s three-part essay “The Age of Horrorism,”
The Guardian
, September 2006, and Hitchens’s
God Is Not Great
(Hachette, 2007) for an extended critique of religion as a species of insanity. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography
Infidel
includes an extended critique of Islam as backward and dehumanizing.

52
. Daniel Dennett,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(Penguin, 2007),
chapter 1
.

53
. Religion, according to these critics, is only one of the monstrosities. Other dehumanizing ideologies include communism, democracy, patriarchy, feminism, and scientism. Joseph Stalin, referring to his own damaging revolutionary policies, is reputed to have shrugged, “If you want to make an omelette, you’ll have to break some
eggs.” Isaiah Berlin damns all such dehumanizing idealism and reminds us that the twentieth century has been the age of disastrous “final solutions.” Utopian thinking, according to Berlin, is divorced from the reality of human lives; it loses the trees for the forest. He characterizes the ideologist as someone whose good intentions (e.g., the future liberation of all mankind) actually blind him to the pain and suffering he is causing in the here and now. “To make such an omelette,” Berlin says, “there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken—that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao, for all I know of Pol Pot.” Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in
The Crooked Timber of Humanity
(Vintage Books, 1992).

54
. Donna Haraway, one of the most influential postmodern monster theorists, attempts to use the metaphor of the cyborg as a liberating and empowering symbol for feminists. In previous decades the cyborg, a hybrid creature, part artificial and part natural, was a disturbing disruption of normality, but now that same disruption is turned into a virtue. Haraway argues that a cyborg, a pastiche creature without essentialist defining parameters, is a kind of model for contemporary women who wish to claim solidarity and political power in a disorderly world that lacks traditional boundaries such as “human nature.” For Haraway and other postmoderns, monsters are metaphors of destabilization, and the goal of such subversion is to weaken the patriarchy and strengthen the repressed and excluded. See Donna Haraway,
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(Routledge, 1991), especially the “Cyborg Manifesto” in
chapter 8
.

55
. The intellectual heirs of Foucault, focused on “othering discourses,” are more interested in how some people are made to
appear
to be monsters. Appearance (representation) is of paramount interest, not
reality
(since for them no reality “really” exists outside of these power discourses).

56
. I think it is entirely possible to accept the idea that monsters resist classification and inhabit the terra incognita without succumbing to the radical metaphysics of postmodern skepticism. The anomalies and exceptions that comprise the monstrous are not unraveling the center, as postmodernists predicted. The monsters remain, even by definition, outsiders. They do not actually or symbolically overthrow the rational.

My objection to postmodern relativism is that it suffers from a severe case of melodrama. Yes, meanings are partially constructed by society, but that doesn’t mean there is no accessible reality. When the semiological linguists noticed that
words
cannot be connected easily to their
referents
(i.e., nothing essential about the word
dog
picks out the four-footed mammal barking outside), they melodramatically inferred that all language (and thought) lacks rational foundation, and
meaning
is just the free play of socially manipulated but ultimately arbitrary signs. This assumption serves as the basis of most postmodern work, but it strikes me as inductively fallacious, empirically false, and strangely provincial (narrowly textual) in its view of human knowledge. The idea that language and thought are sloppy and imprecise is obvious to anyone who has used them and does not indicate a radical relativism of all language, especially in light of the astounding successes of human communication. The assumptions of postmodernism seem slightly ridiculous as soon as we leave the world of literary theory and enter the world of medicine or engineering or even automotive repair. For two quite different but compelling discussions of the relationship between Darwinian theory and postmodernism, see Colin Nazhone Milburn, “Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida,”
MLN
118, no. 3 (2003), and Brian Boyd, “Getting It All Wrong,”
American Scholar
(Autumn 2006).

57
. The deconstructionist David Gunkel announces, “Monsters signify. And what they signify is precisely the deterioration and demise of philosophical demonstration in general.” For Gunkel, rationality, and its servants, have been a controlling force. See
his deconstruction of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Nature
in “Scary Monsters: Hegel and the Nature of the Monstrous,”
International Studies in Philosophy
29, no. 2 (1997).

58
. The one domain where I think postmodernism has had fruitful effect is
aesthetics
. To keep the analytical thread of my book on monstrous creatures and men, I have had to forgo an interesting discussion about the monster idea in the arts. Without getting in too deeply, it is worth pointing out that most Western narratives have had the structural arc of the Aristotelian curve. That is to say, stories, according to Aristotle’s
Poetics
, should have internal cohesion, with beginnings, antecedents and consequential actions, climaxes, resolutions, and endings. Or consider Plato’s
Phaedrus
, the second half of which is entirely devoted to showing how a good story should be like a healthy organism, all parts well formed, essential, and functionally connected to each other. Postmodernism, on the other hand, has nicely celebrated the monstrous artwork: deformed stories without teleological justification. Surrealism began the job, it seems, and postmodernism has continued the tradition of mutilated narratives and hybridized stories. Like teratological offspring, novels and films have placed beginnings in the middle and endings at beginnings and generally twisted around character and plot mechanisms until something quite new emerges. Film and literature have celebrated monstrous turns in their storytelling: non sequiturs, inessential episodes, violations of space and time, and so on. One thinks here of the work of writers like Jorge Borges, Italo Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon, or the films of David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and perhaps Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

59
. See Noor Khan, “Attackers Behead Afghan Teacher for Education of Girls,”
Chicago Sun-Times
, January 5, 2006.

1
. Akira Kurosawa gives high praise to Honda Inoshiro, the director of
Godzilla
. The two filmmakers worked together on many films, including Kurosawa’s
Kagemusha
(1980) and
Ran
(1985). See “A Long Story:
part I
,” in
Akira Kurosawa: Something Like an Autobiography
(Vintage Books, 1983).

2
. In “Where Wonders Await Us” Tim Flannery gives us a shocking and depressing iteration of waste that we’ve dumped into the deep hadal zone. During every war hundreds (even thousands) of vessels and their toxic fuel and munitions sink to the bottom, but even during peacetime the pollution is staggering. Between 1971 and 1990 an average of one ship was lost every two days, and up until the 1970s it was common for countries to dump their chemical weapons. “Britain alone,” Flannery explains, “has dumped 137,000 tons of unwanted chemical weapons at sea, and some of the chemicals still remain in solid form on the bottom.” Moreover, shortly after World War II radioactive waste began to be dumped, and between then and 1993 (when the practice was banned) 142,000 tons had been dumped into the North Atlantic. The mutational results of this kind of pollution are still unclear, but worrisome trends can already be seen. The liver glands of some shrimp species contain a million times the level of polonium-210 than naturally occurs in seawater. Industrial waste causes sex changes in mollusks, and mercury poisoning is so prevalent that most pregnant women already know they should not eat fish. The damaging chemicals that we previously thought would just stay quietly on the bottom of the ocean will in fact come back to haunt us in the food chain.

3
. The genre of science fiction is more than just entertainment when it comes to artificial life and artificial intelligence. The hopeful and horrifying imaginary narratives of sci-fi help us to conceptualize the possible outcomes of our current research trajectories. Dan Dinello’s
Technophobia: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology
(University of Texas Press, 2005) does a nice job surveying the pessimistic sci-fi warnings that
Hollywood has been producing for almost a century. The imagined future is furnished with both terrifying and inspiring depictions of human enhancement.

4
. See Asimov,
I, Robot
(Spectra Reprint, 2008).

5
. See Pete Warren, “Launching a New Kind of Warfare,”
The Guardian
, October 26, 2006.

6
. Dave Bullock, “Inside the Navy’s Armed-Robot Labs,”
Wired
, January 2008.