Being scared of spiders is an evolutionary leftover. So if you recoil from one crawling out of the plughole it is not so much an irrational fear as a survival mechanism. That’s because when prehistoric humans emerged in Africa the venomous arachnids they encountered really were life-threatening and the best thing to do was to avoid them. That instinct has stayed with us down the ages – so many of us still climb the walls at the sight of a harmless creepy-crawly.
Stephen Asma’s On Monsters looks at monstrosity in all its forms, from ancient myths to modern serial killers, from the monsters we carry around in our heads to our perception of the monstrous. We are prone, he thinks, to exaggeration – from the size of the fish which got away to the extent of the horror caused to those of us unfortunate enough to discover a burglar in our homes. So we tend to describe the intruder to police as larger than he was. And, if we are afraid of heights, we see the distance to the ground as greater than it really is when we peek over the precipice. This, according to the cognitive scientist Dennis R Proffitt, has a Darwinian explanation: “With respect to fear of falling the perceptual exaggeration of steep hills and high places increases their apparent threat, and thereby promotes caution and its adaptive advantage.”
The ever-practical Romans had a way of dealing with newborn monsters by drowning hermaphrodites, and then extending that method of despatch to all seriously disabled babies. This was not superstitious but pragmatic. As children they would be an economic burden on their families and, as adults, on the state.
By the Middle Ages, witches were being routinely put to death not just because they represented the devil, but because of the real threat they seemed to pose based on the evidence at the time. A coven of four executed at Windsor in 1579 were accused of killing the former mayor, a landlord, and two butchers by making wax effigies of them and sticking pins in their hearts. Witches were also widely believed to steal babies and remove all feeling from penises. In the former, midwives delivering stillborn babies copped the blame, while the latter was more likely to do with two words which had yet to be invented – erectile dysfunction. But eradicating witches became the Medieval cure for impotence. And one wonders just how attractive midwifery was as a career.
Asma is fond of exploring movie monsters and those found in fiction. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, he says, crystallises a recurring monster theme because the title of her book “has become a shorthand way of describing any human creation that has unintended consequences, from atom bombs to cloned sheep.” The monster’s monster, then.
He discusses whether psychopaths are the products of nature or nurture. Dr Igor Galynker of Beth Israel Medical Centre scanned the brains of 22 paedophiles and found they had below normal activity in their temporal lobes. Tumours in the same region have led to rare cases of the victims acquiring a taste for sex with children, which disappears once the tumour has been removed. This sounds like promising research but Asma dismisses it with a question of his own he never answers. “The old chicken and egg question remains,” he says. “One can always ask whether brain anomalies cause events, or whether events (such as early abuse) cause brain anomalies.” One can. And I would have liked the author to have had a stab at telling us the answer.
Similarly, he examines whether monsters thrive because the society they live in allows them to thrive, as in Nazi Germany where “individual monsters are extensions of monstrous institutional systems.” He quotes the famed psychologist Philip Zimbardo who suggests that torture by otherwise ordinary Americans at the Abu Ghraib detention centre in Iraq “was not, as the Bush administration maintained, a result of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. It was instead the result of a bad barrel corrupting any apples put into it.” Asma could have explored this idea further and it is frustrating that he does not.
And that is the trouble with this book: many questions but few answers. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College, Chicago, and more interested in our psychological response to monsters than he is in the monsters themselves. So the Loch Ness monster, the world’s most famous grotesque, merits only three sentences with no indication from the author what he thinks Nessie might be, or even whether Nessie exists in anything other than overactive imaginations fuelled by optimistic hearsay.
So this book too often feels as if the author has fed the word monsters into his Google search engine and then sprinkled the results onto his text to flavour rather than inform it. If you are interested in how monsters affect the mind then this is the book for you. But if you want to know more about the monsters themselves, then it is not.
