On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (42 page)

The idea that foreign cultures are threatening because their cultural values exclude or compete with one’s own is certainly contentious, but it is, rightly or wrongly, a dominant position of late. With almost three thousand innocent Americans killed on 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, the Patriot Act, repeated embassy and subway bombings, and so on, many people on either side of the East/West divide feel anxious about the new out-groups. These new monsters are hard to pinpoint and isolate. Such a creature has no corporeal body to fight or dismember; it has no lair to infiltrate, no specific skin color, no national boundary. It is everywhere and nowhere. Global terrorism has given us all fresh opportunities to be afraid, both reasonably and unreasonably. We are in a new culture war now, one that nourishes its hostile imagination every day with the real blood of East/West conflict.

Xenophobia goes both ways, of course. Islamic fundamentalism constructs a specific American monster. We are seen as godless, consumerist
zombies
, soulless hedonists without honor, family, or purpose.
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Ayatollah Khomeini famously referred to the United States in a 1979 speech as “the great Satan.” Along with disgust at U.S. imperialism, some fundamentalist Muslims conceive of average Americans as docile cogs in a monstrous secular machine that seems to be grinding forward to subdue every corner of the globe. In their eyes, we are a viper pit of sexual immorality. In some Saudi textbooks students are told not to befriend Jews or Christians because “emulation of the infidels leads to loving them, glorifying them and raising their status in the eyes of Muslims, and that is forbidden.”
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An environment lacking in basic needs (employment, food, shelter, etc.) can produce a dehumanized populace, but an environment with too much wealth and prosperity can also dehumanize. Americans appear zombielike because their raison d’etre appears to be the consumption of goods and pleasures, making us seem more attached to plastic surgery, reality television, and giant SUVs than to family, honor, and integrity. Some American films and novels have explored this critique of consumerist monstrosity, not from an outsider cultural perspective but from within it. Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991
American Psycho
and the 2000 film of the same name explore, among other things, the dehumanizing effects of a sick capitalist society. A privileged wealthy investment banker unravels into a vicious serial killer, but even more chilling is that he doesn’t seem to feel anything, as if his lifestyle of acquisition and hedonism has neutralized his humanity. Films like
American Psycho
and
Donnie Darko
(2001) explore the idea that
American culture itself
is the source of horror.
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From the perspective of some fundamentalists of the Muslim world, American individualism looks less like a point of pride and more like a form of selfish infantilism. To some extent,
this view of Western pleasure zombies just rearticulates Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
version of our future.

The Spartans stand momentarily triumphant in front of a mountain of dead Persian “monsters” in the 2006 film
300
(Warner Bros.). Image courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.

Conversely, some Americans tend to stereotype Muslims as wild-eyed jihadi primitives who seek to destroy our modern and tolerant way of life.
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The mutual animosity is not new. In 1664 an illustrated pamphlet titled
The Monstrous Tartar
became very popular in England. It portrayed a frightening Muslim soldier, supposedly taken prisoner in Hungary. He is depicted as having a three-foot-long crane-like neck and is posed with bow and arrow, ready to oppose the good Christian cause. With only slightly more sophistication, we in the West have continued down to the present with this fabrication of monsters. In 2007 Hollywood released its fictionalized version of the battle of Thermopylae, titled
300
after the number of Spartan soldiers who stood their ground against thousands of invading Persians in 480
BCE
. This famous battle, chronicled by Herodotus among others, stands as a symbolic tribute to the power of military training and efficiency (the Spartans) over sheer numbers and unskilled aggression (Xerxes’ Persian army). More recently, it has also stood as a symbol of the freedom-loving West defending itself against Eastern autocracy.

The visual representation of the Persians in
300
is straight from monster movies. The screen thunders with giant, snarling, twisted and deformed creatures, all bearing down on the buff Spartan heroes. These bad guys, according to the film, are the ancestors of modern Iran, and they drool and bark their way through the film with little resemblance to the human race. Dana Stevens opened her review of the film on Slate.com by saying, “If
300
, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would
be studied today alongside
The Eternal Jew
as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.”
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The Iranian scholar Touraj Daryaee wrote, “In a time when we hear the sirens of war over Iran (Persia), it is ominous that such a film as
300
is released for mass consumption. To depict Persians/Iranians as inarticulate monsters, raging towards the West, trying to rob its people of their basic values demeans the population of Iran and anesthetizes the American population to war in the Middle East.” Continuing his connection to contemporary policy, Daryaee sarcastically says, “This way Bush, Cheney, and other ‘compassionate’ conservatives can more easily rain their precision guided missiles down on the heads of my parents, family members and other Iranians, establish Abu Ghraib detention centers, and perhaps take revenge for the death of the 300 Spartans in antiquity and finally bring democracy, peace and a better way of life to the East.”
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Samuel Huntington suggests that the clash of civilizations is a relatively new break with older, more ideologically oriented animosities, such as communism versus capitalism. But I would argue that civilization xenophobia is only the latest skirmish in the ongoing ideological warfare. In fact, to call it the “latest” is to disregard the history of demoniza-tion. Even before we felt contempt for different races, Westerners felt contempt for barbarian cultures. In that sense, the new xenophobia is the old xenophobia. The strangers of the ancient world were not strange because of their skin color or their exotic geographic location. They were strange because their culture was alien, and they were feared and loathed accordingly.
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Some more recent accusations of monstrous societies include the following well-known variations: Godless communism creates nihilistic, immoral monsters; rabid capitalism and consumerism create hedonistic zombies (Karl Marx actually referred to capitalism as a “vampire” sucking the blood of the labor class); theocracy creates uncritical fanatical zealots. We know these are monstrous societies, the logic goes, because they produce monstrous results: genocide, terrorism, and torture.

What’s seemingly new, conceptually speaking, is that after the heyday of
internal
Freudian aggression theory, the pendulum has swung and we now have radical social constructionism—in plain English, extreme
nurture
over nature. Systems are evil, not people. It is society or ideology that churns out monsters; the blame is diffused to the larger social system.
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This view fits nicely with liberal postmodern ideas about
structural
rather than
individual
responsibility, but it also sits well with neoconservative arguments that we must alter the cultures of theocracies and monarchies everywhere in order to create freer, happier, decidedly nonmonstrous
individuals at home and abroad. We live in a time when it is reasonable to think of monsters as socially conditioned or constructed.

In the 1960s Hannah Arendt articulated a new kind of monster. In
Eich-mann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
she gives us a picture of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust, as a calm, almost robotic psychopath. Eichmann was not so much an anti-Semite as an unfeeling, detached career man looking for the most expeditious path to professional success. He lacked empathy, just like the psychopaths I discussed in
chapter 13
. Arendt points out that “it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster,” but “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
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Thinking about Arendt’s description of Eichmann, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram framed the notorious Nazi within his overall theory of situational evil. Most people, Milgram argued, would do heinous immoral acts if certain social expectations were placed on them. Recall from the introduction that Milgram asked test subjects to administer painful electrical shocks to other subjects. He was surprised to find how many subjects were willing to follow orders no matter what the cost in human suffering. Milgram concluded that people become torturers and abusers when they are inside specific dehumanizing social frameworks. Individual monsters are extensions of monstrous institutional systems.
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Earlier ages recognized the unhealthy group dynamic of mobs. In the seventeenth century Thomas Browne saw large crowds as enemies of reason, virtue, and religion, “a monstrosity more prodigious than the hydra.” In the twentieth century theorists expanded this image to include schools, prisons, the military, corporations, churches, and other potentially corrupting organizations. The psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a well-known prison experiment at Stanford University in 1971 using college students to role-play guards and inmates. Even though the assignment of specific roles was entirely random and reflected no culpability on the part of the “inmates,” the experiment revealed a very rapid descent into sadistic abuse by the “guards.” Eventually the experiment had to be halted, but not before it demonstrated to Zimbardo that a kind of overwhelming power exists in certain situations, a power that can sweep away an individual’s better judgment.

Dr. Zimbardo updated his original findings in a recent book titled
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
, applying his
situational theory to the notorious case of torture in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
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The fact that seemingly normal American soldiers engaged in torture and degradation techniques on Iraqi detainees offers more evidence, Zimbardo thinks, for his view that abuse and aggression are not the results of inner character flaws. The torture at Abu Ghraib was not, as the Bush administration maintained, a result of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. It was instead, according to Zimbardo, the result of a “bad barrel” corrupting any apples put into it.
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It was an institution that pressured soldiers to gather intelligence by any means necessary, and this “end justifies the means” philosophy gave interrogators carte blanche in their treatment of the detainees.

Unlike the Freudian view of monstrous behavior, which focused on the deformities of the individual’s inner psyche, the new paradigm sees a “Lucifer effect” in the external structures of social interaction. Zimbardo writes, “Situational forces can work to transform even some of the best of us into Mr. Hyde monsters, without the benefit of Dr. Jekyll’s chemical elixir. We must be more aware of how situational variables can influence our behavior.”
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This viewpoint of criminality and deviance was only starting to show itself in the days of the Leopold and Loeb murder, when Erle Stanley Gardner said “society itself was partly responsible” and “we are only beginning to realize that the sole cause does not lie entirely with the juvenile.”
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Now this societal view (some might call it a
structural
view) has become standard operating procedure. In fact, so common is this new view of monsters that many contemporary deviants go straight to it when explaining their own depravity.

Ted Bundy killed more than thirty people in the late 1970s, although some (including Bundy himself) put the figure much higher. He also engaged in sexual assault and necrophilia. Hours before he was executed in 1989, Bundy gave a final interview to the evangelical leader James Dobson in which he blamed pornography for leading him astray. Bundy went so far as to say that every other ne’er-do-well he had met in prison during his ten-year stretch had also been inspired to evil by pornography and violence in the media: “Those of us who have been so much influenced by violence in the media—in particular, pornographic violence—aren’t some kind of inherent monsters. We are your sons, and we are your husbands. We grew up in regular families.”
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